Here, the absence of hope does not minimize the import of black resistance rather, it makes that resistance monumental in scale, turning it into the principled opposition of those who opt for dignity over inhumanity. They were about the power and necessity of immediate defiance.” To Coates, these women are heroes because they resisted in moments when resistance’s benefits would not be immediately legible. Wells, who defied the great wave of lynching even when the men whom it victimized would not, even as the country turned away from her … the lessons they passed down were not about an abstract hope, an unknowable dream.

“My ancestors,” he writes in Eight Years, “had not lived in times of hope … They were Celia, enslaved, hanged for murdering her master, but who for a brief moment, stick in hand, lifeless body beneath her, knew freedom … They were Ida B. Let’s take his argument that Coates ignores black “fightback.” While Coates might eschew calls for conventional hope, he does not fail to track the scope and import of black resistance. West’s reading is blinkered in several key ways.

But it’s pretty shocking that he authored a partially baked, inaccurate hot take that all but labels Coates a stooge of white liberalism-an accusation that feels especially reckless coming from a writer of West’s stature. The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb also assailed West on Twitter, accusing him of “cloak petty rivalry as disinterested analysis.” It’s hard to say for sure, of course, whether West was motivated more by competitiveness or by ideology. (It is probably not a coincidence that West’s Twitter feed is full of plugs for the 25 th-anniversary edition of Race Matters.) Coates addressed West’s attack but deleted it along with his entire Twitter account. Not only is it a case of one of black thought’s elder statesmen attempting a hatchet job on a younger writer, West thoroughly botches the job via disingenuous readings from which a reader is tempted to conclude one of two things: Either he hasn’t read We Were Eight Years in Powervery closely, or he has intentionally misrepresented Coates’ writing in an attempt to bolster his own brand. West’s importance to contemporary black thought is what makes his recent Guardian broadside against Coates so disheartening.

We were eight years in power