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We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)

Prior to the publication of “The Case for Reparations” in 2013, Ta-Nehisi Coates was a little-known blogger turned Senior Editor of The Atlantic magazine. Today, Coates has emerged as not only the top contemporary black intellectual, but a leading American thinker – regardless of race – with stinging critiques of President Barack Obama’s administration and American racism. Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy traces the evolution of his writing career as it coincides with the eight years of the first black presidency, detailing Coates’ personal life as he completed each assignment, his relationship with Obama, and the public reaction to his essays. Coates chooses an article for each year of Obama’s presidency to describe the disparate moods of Americans towards racism, each essay blending testimonies and historical research. Coates provides a brief introduction to each article, all of which are published by The Atlantic, to describe the financial struggles he and his family faced while establishing himself as a writer, the inspiration and reasoning behind his subject choice, and his post-publication thoughts on each essay.

As Coates became a best-selling author with the publication of Between the World and Me, more attention was placed on his journalistic work. According to the author, these articles are joined here in an effort to provide a fresh take on the previous eight years to describe the historical and contemporary ideas of Black America, from within and without: the black conservatism of Bill Cosby; the nuances of black identity represented by Michelle Obama; the Civil War in the collective black memory and historical imagination; the uses and misuses of Malcolm X’s legacy; the limitations of a black presidency due to “white innocence”; the stifling of black wealth through discriminatory housing policies; the destructive power of negative stereotypes of black families and its relationship to mass incarceration; and Obama’s reflection on his eight years in office. Coates’ concluding epilogue, “The First White President,” describes how the “bloody heirloom” – or centuries of white supremacy and violence against black communities – is used to negate the first black presidency through the election of Donald Trump.

Coates seeks to push boundaries, not only to demystify notions of a post-racial society, but to contextualize America’s first black presidency within the broader scope of American racism. The author explores the complexities of Obama’s attempts to carve out a path in American politics, pitting the impact of black radicalism and the president’s rich knowledge of black history against a persona made palatable for white Americans – what Coates refers to as the “third way – a means of communicating his affection for white America without fawning over it.” The irony in Coates’ assessment is that a distinctly black man, one who refrained from common ideas of assimilation, could rise to the nation’s highest office while still facing the limitations that black Americans experience individually and collectively. While Coates makes the simplified argument that a black presidency does not equate to the end of racism, in these articles he also seeks to uncover the nuances of racial discrimination in Obama’s response to white racial sensibilities.

Ta-Nehisi Coates (via Flickr)

The unique writing career of Ta-Nehisi Coates has produced a leading black voice in public discourse on historical and contemporary American race relations. In a way, it is fitting for Coates to trace his writing career alongside Obama’s presidency given the remarkable similarities of a black journalist and a black politician maintaining their distinctive racial qualities when, historically, they would be rejected by white America in such fields. Coates’ platform in The Atlantic gives him for a wide, predominately white audience that most black journalists do not enjoy. Coates recognizes this fact in the introduction to his article on reparations, claiming that this particular essay “was a lesson in what serious writing married to the right platform could actually achieve.” In other words, arguments that not only surround reparations, but the systematic oppression of black Americans found in black publications that target a black readership are reduced by white audiences to unimportant racial grievances who dismiss “legitimate ideas” because they are not considered by “people of the right ‘reputation.’”

When evaluated individually, each of Coates’ articles tackles a sensitive subject involving the black community, past and present, that is often hidden or unacknowledged by white America. Placed alongside each other, Coates’ powerful illustrations capture the broad, ever-changing nature of American racism. Coates’ thoughts, however, are a departure from the black intellectual tradition, most notably due to his lack of religious faith as evidenced throughout his work. Not only does Coates identify as an atheist, but he makes no attempt to comfort his audience by offering faith or promoting values that transcend America’s history of racism and oppression. Instead, he forces his audience to confront the destructive nature of prejudice, telling the reader that no one can save us but ourselves; ultimately, it is up to us to decide the next move.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (2018)

by Augusta Dell’omo

Donald Trump responded to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House in a predictable way. The President launched an incoherent, childish tweetstorm, labeling Wolff “mentally deranged” and an agent of the “Fake News Media,” which, typically, drew even more attention to the book. Indeed, in the hours after the President’s tweets, Fire and Fury shot to the top of the New York Times’ bestseller list. In his alleged exposé of a scandal-ridden administration, Wolff promised to include everything in this new work, from insider’s knowledge of the frigid marriage between the President and First Lady, to Ivanka Trump’s mockery of “the Donald’s” hair. Fire and Fury proved almost instantly popular amongst an exasperated American electorate, regardless of methodological problems that dominate the work.

Does Wolff’s book merit serious consideration from scholars? Is it an historical account? Fire and Fury does not seem to fit the typical model of a presidential history. Wolff’s work seems most similar to political journalist Joe McGinniss in The Selling of the President 1968. Unlike, say David McCullough’s John Adams and David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, which rely on meticulous research to evaluate the President’s accomplishments throughout the course of a presidency, McGinnis and Wolff hone in on a few short months at the beginning of the president’s term. McGinniss followed the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon, often seen as Trump’s closest historical parallel. Both McGinniss and Wolff benefit a great deal from their insider’s access and a sensationalist writing style in the midst of presidential scandal.

Even as a work of journalism, though, Fire and Fury defies convention. Wolff often inserts tawdry detail and gossip that would be incredibly difficult to substantiate. While this makes it problematic to verify, Fire and Fury does capture the flavor of White House operations in a way that traditional reporting does not. For instance, it may be hard to verify that Ivanka Trump and Dina Powell tried to convince Trump to take a “presidential stance” regarding human rights atrocities using a PowerPoint of graphic, violent imagery or that Trump then poured over for hours and showed to others, but the inclusion of this gossip gives the reader a window into the character of the President, even if it is based on rumor.

Campaigning in Arizona, October 2016 (via Gage Skidmore, Flickr)

Fire and Fury is especially useful in understanding the flawed cast of characters that vie for control over Trump and his “agenda,” (something Wolff doubts really exists). Traditional media coverage, understandably, focuses to such a degree on the President that his backdrop of enablers, at times, fades into the background. According to Wolff, the failures of the Trump administration can be tied directly to the mismanagement and political infighting of the fools surrounding him, including General H.R. McMasters and Reince Priebus. Throughout Fire and Fury, Wolff contends that the current state of the administration springs from a basic fact of the Trump administration: that the current POTUS never actually wanted to win the presidency. The Trump family, according to Wolff, saw the 2016 election as a grand moneymaking scheme, only seeking to elevate their national profile—and their brand revenues. After his surprise win, Wolff argues, Trump entered the White House particularly unmoored from reality, governed solely by personal impulse and self-gratification. The excesses and corruption of the current administration emerge in startling display and Wolff persuasively shows the collective inability of Washington’s establishment to curb the impulses of the White House.

Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus looks into the Oval Office as President Donald Trump reads over his notes, Friday, March 10, 2017, prior to meeting with the Healthcare Specific House Committee Leadership at the White House (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, via Wikipedia)

Wolff suspiciously manages to hit almost all of the mini-presidential scandals that seem to emerge almost daily with the current administration, an impressive feat. For instance, Wolff has a knack for bringing seemingly disparate political moments together. One chapter manages to connect Trump’s frustrations over the situation in Afghanistan and his issues with General H.R. McMasters to the decision to bring in Anthony Scaramucci. In doing so, Wolff creates the breakneck pace of news since Trump’s inauguration and brings the reader into the center of an ongoing crisis in which Trump’s lackeys try to use one crisis to resolve another. Unsettlingly, and predictably, Trump’s messengers seem as overwhelmed as the rest of the American populace.

Unfortunately, Fire and Fury is riddled with methodological problems. Wolff consistently fails to cite sources. Speculation is indistinguishable from on-the-record quotes throughout. Tracing Wolff’s line of argumentation is impossible, because he masks much of his evidence under the guise of protecting sources. Wolff uses this umbrella of protection even when using full quotations from figures like Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner—a highly unorthodox use of journalistic convention. Furthermore, Wolff uses Trump’s ill-preparedness for the highest office in the land as proof that Trump “never wanted to be President.” He ignores the fact that Trump has publicly flirted with the idea of running for president since the 1980s, even discussing it on national television with Oprah in 1988. Whether or not these were sincere ambitions, Trump clearly desired the power and influence that came with the presidency. Wolff’s shortcomings not only dilute his arguments, but bring the rest of his work into question.

Protest against Presidential Executive Order banning entry of citizens of Muslim-majority countries into the United States, in front of the White House, Washington, DC (via Wikimedia Commons)

The most glaring problem in Fire and Fury is Wolff’s treatment of the President’s connection to white supremacy. Throughout the book Wolff portrays Trump as an incompetent, narcissist, incapable of thinking outside the paradigm of personal vanity. However, Wolff ignores how Trump uses white supremacy to maintain a connection with his most ardent supporters. Look no further than the President’s disgusting comments regarding Haitian and African immigrants that he hoped would play well with his base. Yet, Wolff argues that not only are left-wing accusations of Trump’s racism “hysterical,” but also that white supremacists like Richard Spencer prove “pesky” for the White House. Wolff claims that he only criticized former National Football League quarterback and activist Colin Kaepernick because Trump was annoyed that he wasn’t getting the attention he felt he deserved. Instead of acknowledging proof of the President’s calculated racism and his active connection with white supremacists, Wolff insists Trump merely “tolerates a race-tinged political view.” By hedging his discussion of the racism of the Trump administration, Wolff manages to create an image of the President as an almost entirely impulse driven figure without political calculation. Undoubtedly, impulse and narcissism govern the President. But to depict Trump like this ignores the President’s long history of racism going back to the 1970s, with notable examples including avoiding renting to African-Americans, taking out full page ads in New York newspapers urging for the death penalty of the Central Park Five in 1989, and calling his black casino employees “lazy.”

Wolff calls Fire and Fury “explosive,” but in reality, it validates much of the current speculation regarding the gross incompetence of the Trump administration. Readers should take caution, however, with Wolff’s portrayal of a child-like President. Throughout most of Fire and Fury, Wolff argues that Trump and his colleagues have no idea what they are doing. But, perhaps the exact opposite is true.

Also by Augusta Dell’omo on Not Even Past:

Angela Merkel: Europe’s Most Influential Leader by Matthew Qvortrup (2016)
History Calling: LBJ and Thurgood Marshall on the Telephone
Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman (1992)

Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes

by Jacqueline Jones

In each of my graduate seminars, at the beginning of the semester, I caution students not to use certain words I consider problematic; these words can actually hinder our understanding of a complex past. Commonly used—or rather, overused—in everyday conversation as well as academic discourse, the banned words include “power,” “freedom,” and “race.” I tell my students that these words are imprecise—they had different meanings depending upon the times and places in which they were used– and that today we tend to invoke them too casually and even thoughtlessly.

Oh yes, and there is another word I ask my students to avoid—“feminism.” Students often greet this particular injunction with surprise and dismay. Does it mean that their instructor believes that women should stay at home and not venture into the paid labor force? If so, why is she standing in front of a classroom now? So I have to be sure to make a case about the pitfalls related to the use of the word. Even the broadest possible definition is problematic, as we shall see.

Protesters at the 2017 Women’s March (via Wikimedia Commons).

The purpose of the massive march on Washington held on January 21, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, was to protest his election. It was called the “Women’s March,” and as we all know, sister marches took place all over the country and the world the same day. A group of women initiated the idea of the protest, and took care of all the logistics; many participants wore pink “pussy hats” to call attention to the President’s demeaning remarks about grabbing women’s genitals captured on the infamous Access Hollywood videotape. The hand-held signs at the rally covered a whole range of issues, including abortion and reproductive rights, equal pay, sexual harassment, Black Lives Matter, protection for undocumented immigrants, public education, and women’s struggles for fair treatment and equality generally. Presumably, Trump’s election had prompted an historic level of anger and frustration among women. Many news outlets, participants, and observers suggested that the march represented a remarkable display of re-energized, twenty-first century feminism, with the word itself suggesting a kind of transcendent womanhood bringing together women of various ages, races, classes, and ethnicity.

Protesters at a sister rally in 2017 (via Pixabay).

Well, not exactly. Although only 6 percent of African American women voted for Trump, 53 percent of white women did. We can safely assume, then, that many white women not only stayed away from the march, but also objected to it in principle: the pink-pussy-hat contingent did not speak for them. So we might ask, which groups of women did not march? Here is a possible, partial list: devout Catholic women who believe that birth control, abortion, and gay marriage are sins against God; former factory workers who were fired from their jobs when their plants were shipped overseas; the wives and daughters and mothers of unemployed coal miners; anti-immigrant activists; women of color who saw the march as dominated by white women; and pro-gun rights supporters. Missing too were probably women who found Mr. Trump’s video sex-talk disgusting but chose not to see this as the defining issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign–just as some liberal women might have disapproved of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky but did not let that affair diminish their support for him when he was president. In both these cases, the pro-Trump and pro-Clinton supporters expressed less solidarity with the men’s victims and more support for other elements of the men’s politics. In other words, these women eschewed any putative “sisterhood” in favor of other political issues.

Suffragists parade down Fifth Avenue, 1917 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Another way of looking at this issue is to challenge the view that feminists had as their greatest priority a woman president. How many self-identified feminists were eager to see Sarah Palin run for president in 2012? Again, for many women, their overriding concern is not womanhood per se but a wide range of political beliefs and commitments. As we learned soon after U. S. women got the right to vote in 1919, different groups of women have different politics; in the 1920s, the suffragists were astonished to find that women tended to vote the way their husbands did, according to a matrix of ethnic and class factors.

Delegation of officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1917 (US National Archives via Flickr).

The example of the Women’s March suggests that, for all the talk today of “intersectionality” (the interconnectedness of certain social signifiers such as class, religion, “race,” and gender) “feminism” promotes a very specific political agenda, one that does not necessarily reflect the priorities and lived experience of a substantial portion of the female population. In essence, the word “feminism” is too vague to have much meaning within a society where women have multiple forms of identity, and gender might or might not be the defining one at any particular time. Even the broadest possible definition—feminists are people who seek to advance the interests or the equal rights of women—has its limitations.

As an historian, I would suggest several reasons why students should avoid the use of the word “feminism”–unless they encounter the word in a primary text; then they should try to figure out what the user meant by it.

The word itself did not appear in common usage until the 1920s. Therefore it would be a mistake to apply it to people before that time, or to people since who themselves have not embraced the label; otherwise we risk imposing a term on historical actors who might or might not have used it to describe themselves.

Throughout history, various waves of the so-called “women’s” or “feminist” movement were actually riven by intense conflicts among women. Around the turn of the twentieth century, leading white suffragists went out of their way to denigrate their black counterparts and express contempt for immigrant and working class men and women. The early organizers of the National Organization for Women feared that association with lesbians and militant black women would taint their drive for respectability. Organizers of the 2017 Women’s march debated whether or not anti-abortion women could or should be included in the protest: could one be a feminist and at the same time oppose reproductive rights for women?

Two Lowell mill workers, ca. 1840 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Often in history when we find solidarity among women it is not because these groups of women sought to advocate better working conditions or the right to vote for all women; rather, their reference group consisted of women like themselves. In the 1840s, Lowell textile mill workers walked off the job and went on strike not as “feminists,” but as young white Protestant women from middling households—in other words, as women who had much in common with each other. Religion, ethnicity, lineage, and “race” have all been significant sources of identity for women; when a particular group of women advocates for itself, it is not necessarily advocating for all other women.

Similarly, we are often tempted to label those strong women we find in history as “feminists,” on the assumption that they spoke and acted on behalf of all women. Yet they might have believed they had more in common with their male counterparts than with other groups of women. Female labor-union organizers probably felt more affinity with their male co-workers than with wealthy women who had no experience with wage work. In other words, the transcendent sisterhood that feminism presupposes is often a myth, a chimera.

The word not only lacks a precise definition, it also carries with it a great deal of baggage. Indeed, some people have a visceral, negative reaction to the sound of it. It is difficult to use a term with such varied and fluid meanings. And feminism meant something different to women of the 1960s, when they could not open a credit-card account in their own name or aspire to certain “men’s jobs,” when they debated the social division of labor in the paid workplace and in the home, compared to young women today, who at times see feminism through the prism of music lyrics, movies, fashion, and celebrity culture: Is the talented, fabulously wealthy Taylor Swift a feminist?

Finally, a personal note: In the 1960s, I was a college student and caught up in what was then called the “feminist movement” as shaped by Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique and the newly formed National Organization for Women. My mother disapproved of my emerging priorities in life; she had gotten married right after World War II, and she believed (rightly, as it turned out) that the movement denigrated her choice to stay home full-time with her children. I was puzzled and distressed that my mother could not appreciate my choices; but now I am also puzzled and distressed that the movement could not appreciate her choices. Coming of age during the war, she feared that she would never marry and have a family, and when she finally had that opportunity, she was happy—for the most part—to embrace it, despite the considerable financial sacrifice for the household that her choice entailed.

Women’s March 2017 (Backbone Campaign via Flickr).

Perhaps, with very few exceptions—equal pay for equal work?—there are few issues on which all women everywhere can agree. My own view is that, we can pursue social justice in ways that advance the interests of large numbers of men as well as women, without having to defend the dubious proposition that “feminism” as constructed today speaks to and for all women. It doesn’t. For the historian, that fact means that we have to come up with other, more creative ways of discussing forms of women’s activism and personal self-advancement that took place in the past, and, in altered form, continue today.

Also by Jacqueline Jones on Not Even Past:

The Works of Stephen Hahn.
On the Myth of Race in America.
History in a “Post-Truth” Era.

A New Fascist Revolution?

By Susan George Schorn

The Fascist Revolution: Toward a Theory of General Fascism, is a collection of essays written over a 35-year period and published in 1999 (the year of author George L. Mosse’s death). It offers not a comprehensive vision of fascist ideology, but a succession of views, each through a different lens: aesthetics, fascism, racism, nationalism, intellectualism, and so on. The resulting analytical kaleidoscope is particularly thought provoking to read against the current upheaval in American politics, especially the rage that has fed the Tea Party and Bundy Ranch supporters and is now buoying up the presidential campaign of populist billionaire Donald Trump.

Today’s political dialogue shares some obvious attributes with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, such as the celebration of national identity and an embrace of violence, sacrifice, and brutality. The rhetoric of this year’s Republican primary debates has resounded with such themes. But Mosse identifies two other fundamental tenets of fascism—irrationality and revolutionary activism—that are commonly overlooked, and which have suggestive echoes in the current zeitgeist.

Tea Party protesters walk towards the United States Capitol during the Taxpayer March on Washington, September 12, 2009. Via Wikipedia.

Fascism was inherently irrational, a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, and profoundly anti-intellectual. This irrationality (which Mosse connects, in the case of German National Socialism, to Europe’s late-nineteenth-century embrace of Romanticism), was long ignored by historians as “too outré to be taken seriously.” Yet as Mosse shows, irrationality served an important function in the workings of the party and the ideology. It provided a means for followers to resolve “a very real dilemma: after 1918 the society in which they lived did not seem to function well or even to function at all.” Fascism made an idealist promise to somehow transcend the social instability of the time. The details were purposely left vague, conveniently discouraging adherents from looking too closely at the movement’s methods.

It is intriguing to consider fascism’s use of irrationality in light of modern calls to “Take back America” by processes that range from the improbable (repealing a broadly popular national healthcare policy) to the ludicrous (forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall). A sizeable percentage of America’s electorate, aware that today’s globalized economy does not function well—at least not for them—seems quite willing to suspend rationality and believe such promises. Fortunately, there is scant evidence that today’s promise-makers have either the means or the aptitude to make anything more than symbolic gestures toward fulfilling their promises.

Trump speaks at an Arizona rally in March 2016. Via wikipedia.

Fascism was also, Mosse notes, explicitly revolutionary; an activist doctrine that focused its energy on destroying the existing order and replacing it with something new (though in Germany’s case, the future would be informed by the past). In this way, fascism stood in opposition to conservatism, an arrangement that also resonates strongly with today’s headlines. Witness the consternation of today’s GOP officials, who have lost control of their nomination process and seem to no longer even understand the anger of their own base. But while twentieth-century fascists made devastating use of the revolutionary energy they generated, modern conservative politicians appear caught off guard by voters’ revolutionary zeal, their willingness to destroy institutions in order to bring about the change they perceive as vital to national survival. It is somehow comforting to realize that our politicians are markedly less competent than the fascists in this regard.

And there are other important differences between our era and that, which gave rise to European fascism. Though economic uncertainty is again a factor in our politics, the intense anxiety over “respectability” Mosse identifies as a breeding ground for fascism’s moral code is largely absent today; we are, perhaps, simply more relaxed now. The mistrust of cultural pluralism undergirding today’s pro-nationalist arguments is partly a response to demographic trends that make it all but impossible for those concerns to become mainstream. Our understanding of “nation” has shifted, becoming more diverse. And while the fascist obsession with sexuality, and control of it, has its echoes now, recent attempts to criminalize abortion, birth control, and gender non-conformity have failed at the national level and are likely to be rolled back in the states where they have found purchase. Supporters of such policies are part of a smaller, and shrinking, population.

Still, there are enough eerie similarities in Mosse’s essays to make them rewarding reading for anyone curious about the growth and spread of destructive ideologies—including those presently in circulation.

George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a Theory of General Fascism (Howard Fertig, 1999)

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