Talks & Entertainment

In 2008, The Atlantic’s national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates went from believing that a black president was impossible to being challenged by the sudden prospect of one. In his new book,  We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Coates examines the threads between the unprecedented election of Barack Obama and what fueled the election of Donald Trump, who Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”

The book revisits each year of the Obama administration through Coates’ experiences and observations, all of which are linked together through iconic essays previously published in The Atlantic, including “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations,” “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” and more. In conversation with The Atlantic‘s Contributing Editor Alex Wagner.