Should-Read: FYI, IMHO Cornel West has not read even the first page of Ta-Nehisi Coates's "We Were Eight Years in Power": An American Tragedy. The very first words of the book are:
INTRODUCTION
Regarding Good Negro Government
In 1895, two decades after his state moved from the egalitarian innovations of Reconstruction to an oppressive “Redemption,” South Carolina congressman Thomas Miller appealed to the state’s constitutional convention:
We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.
By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been painted as a fundamentally corrupt era of “Negro Rule.” It was said that South Carolina stood under threat of being “Africanized” and dragged into barbarism and iniquity. Miller hoped that by highlighting black achievement in governance and marshaling a credible defense of black morality, he might convince the doubtlessly fair-minded people of South Carolina to preserve the citizenship rights of African Americans. His plea went unheeded. The 1895 constitution added both literacy tests and property requirements as qualifications for enfranchisement. When those measures proved insufficient to enforcing white supremacy, black citizens were shot, tortured, beaten, and maimed...
It would not have been possible for Cornel West to have read the first page of We Were Eight Years of Power and said the following with a good heart: German Lopez: Cornel West’s attacks on Ta-Nehisi Coates, explained - Vox: "In discussing the “black elite leadership” that has tried to fit into “a neoliberal world,” West cited “[d]ear brother Ta-Nehisi Coates” as an example...
...Commenting on Coates’s book, We Were Eight Years in Power, West remarked, “Who’s the ‘we’? When’s the last time he’s been through the ghetto, in the hoods, to the schools and indecent housing and mass unemployment? We were in power for eight years? My God. Maybe he and some of his friends might have been in power, but not poor working people.... He represents the neoliberal wing that sounds militant about white supremacy but renders black fightback invisible.... This wing reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people.”...
Much of West’s criticism of how Coates describes Obama, however, seems to come from a misunderstanding of Coates’s point. West has criticized the title of Coates’s book, _We Were Eight Years in Power+, because he interpreted it to suggest that the book means black Americans were, through Obama, eight years in power. In reality, the title of the book comes from a quote from a black Reconstruction-era politician, Rep. Thomas Miller... [who] points out that when black leaders were elected in the post–Civil War era, they managed to govern without the kinds of catastrophes that racists warned of.... Coates... is arguing, instead, is that Obama showed, with a relatively conventional, scandal-free government, that a black person can lead the US—and that alone dealt a big blow to white supremacy. Columnist Charles Mudede explained in the Stranger: “The concept, which West should have given a little more consideration even if he disagreed with it, is this: Whenever blacks show they can rule, white supremacists freak out and do everything they can to bury the evidence of ‘Good Negro Government’”...
