We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

by Ta-Nehisi Coates,
The Florida Courier, November 17, 2017

Ta-Nehisi Coates has always wanted to write with gravity and clarity, without sanctimony or sentimentality. Art, he believes, “must reflect the world in all its brutality and beauty, not in the hopes of changing it but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie, to not be coopted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us.”