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Ta-Nehisi CoatesA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
In the Introduction, Coates frames Black Americans’ participation in governing the United States during Reconstruction and the Obama presidency as “period[s] of Good Negro Government” (xv). White supremacists consistently misrepresent these eras to bolster their belief in inherent Black inferiority. Coates also explains the rationale behind the organization of the collection: Coates has included an essay from each year of the Obama presidency.
In 2007, the year leading up to the election of Barack Obama, Coates was unemployed and felt like a failure as a breadwinner and a writer. His state of mind was not improved by the consistent messages he received that his situation was due to a lack of effort. His fortunes improved when he got an assignment to write a piece on Bill Cosby for The Atlantic. This trajectory-changing assignment had little to do with hard work. It was luck, rather than that mythical “self-generated success” that Americans so love (7), that saved him. With growing interest in Obama, people and publications were more interested in hearing about matters of race, so there was a market for Coates’s work.
When Coates wrote the essay, what he aimed for was a critique of Cosby’s conservative racial politics.
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