The piece with which Ta-Nehisi Coates opens his new collection of essays, WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER, offers a stunning reflection on how much changed in eight years and how much has stayed exactly the same. Before Barack Obama was elected president, Coates reminds us, he (and, he implies, many less famous black journalists like him) was on the verge of going nowhere. A college dropout with a supportive partner and a young son, Coates had moved to New York to become a writer, but at the tail end of the George W. Bush administration, it didn’t really seem like anyone --- at least anyone in the predominantly white mainstream --- really cared what he had to say.

All that changed, Coates argues, with the election of Obama. All of a sudden, the mainstream media wanted to hear from young black journalists and intellectuals, people who had been studying and thinking about issues of race and privilege and power much longer and more deeply than had most of the pundits on TV and in the print media. All of a sudden, knowledge and perspective like Coates’ seemed not only relevant, but essential during this unprecedented time.

"WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER is a vivid, essential retrospective of a time that already seems to be receding in the rearview mirror, and an urgent reminder of why we continue to need critical, energetic voices like Coates to remind us of who we are and where we have been."

Now, eight years later, Coates has written a bestselling memoir (BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME), won numerous grants and fellowships, and is one of the most influential writers for The Atlantic, as well as perhaps the closest thing we have anymore to a so-called public intellectual. The change in his fortune seems, in retrospect, as meteoric and perhaps as unlikely as the ascendancy of Obama himself. But, as Coates’ opening piece (not to mention the book’s subtitle, “An American Tragedy”) points out, perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same. The book’s title comes from an 1895 speech by South Carolina Congressman Thomas Miller, bemoaning the rise of an oppressive “Redemption” that came too swiftly on the heels of a relatively egalitarian post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Coates does not shy away from comparing that period --- when whites aggressively tamped down so-called Good Negro Government with policies that have led to more than a century of systemic inequality and oppression --- with our own post-Obama era.

Coates’ book collects eight essays --- one for each year of the Obama presidency --- all of which were originally published in The Atlantic. Before each of these essays, he provides a newly written piece that provides personal or historical context, that evaluates how well each piece has held up over time, and/or that considers the essay anew in the light of hindsight. Given how popular Coates’ writing became during (and in the immediate aftermath of) Obama’s presidency, at least some of these essays --- including his now-famous argument for reparations, as well as essays on mass incarceration and the Civil War --- will be familiar to many readers. But reading them in a single volume, and with the added context of Coates’ retrospective analysis and current events, gives them added heft and relevance, even as some of them (such as the opening essay about Bill Cosby that now appears almost innocent in light of everything that has surfaced since) seem like artifacts of a different time.

Coates, rather notably, has been critical of Obama at times, faulting him for not going far enough on matters of race or for employing so-called respectability politics that, he argues, fail to recognize the complexity of many black people’s experience --- experiences that, he suggests in the essay “My President Was Black,” Obama doesn’t quite share. But despite their differences of opinion and approach, Coates’ tone, especially in the closing essay, the mini-intros to each essay, and most notably the epilogue “The First White President,” is clearly elegiac, a mourning for a time that now seems even more remarkable and that, he appears to suggest, we are unlikely to encounter again.

WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER is a vivid, essential retrospective of a time that already seems to be receding in the rearview mirror, and an urgent reminder of why we continue to need critical, energetic voices like Coates to remind us of who we are and where we have been.