I used to think that maybe I’d let my anger serve as an engine. But I’ve since discovered that my anger over each new racist incident is now rivaled and augmented by the anger I feel when asked to explain, once more, why black people shouldn’t be brutalized, insulted, and killed. If you’re a person of color, the racism beat is also a professional commitment to defending your right and the right of people like you to be treated with consideration to an audience filled with readers champing at the bit to call you nothing but a nigger playing the race card. The hostility directed at writers who cover minority beats in America is solid proof that those people are doing important work. But that work can be exhausting. It’s exhausting to always be writing and thinking about a new person being racist or sexist or otherwise awful. It’s exhausting to feel compelled on a consistent basis to defend your claim to dignity. It’s exhausting to then watch those defenses drift beyond the reaches of the internet’s short memory, or to coffee tables in dentists’ offices, to be forgotten about until you link to them the next time you need to say essentially the same thing. After a while you may want to respond to every request for a take on the day’s newest racist incident with nothing but a list of corresponding, pre-drafted truths, like a call-center script for talking to bigots. Having written thousands of words about white people who have slurred the president over the past six years, you begin to feel as if the only appropriate way to respond to new cases—the only way you can do it without losing your mind—is with a single line of text reading, “Black people are normal people deserving of the same respect afforded to anyone else, but they often aren’t given that respect due to the machinations of white supremacy.” […] I’m ready for people in positions of power at magazines and newspapers and movie studios to recalibrate their understanding of what it means to talk about race in the first place. If America would like to express that it truly values and appreciates the voices of its minorities, it will listen to all their stories, not just the ones reacting to its shortcomings and brutality. If this doesn’t eventually happen, I wonder how many more writers of color will come to the conclusion, as my colleague did, that this life we’ve made for ourselves is unsustainable. How many essays can go up before fatigue becomes anger becomes insanity? How many op-ed columns before you can feel the gruesomeness of trying to defend another dead black kid slowly hollowing you out? How many different ways can you find to say that you’re a human being?

The writer's critics call him a cynic. But as a new anthology shows, his thinking has matured in subtle ways over the years. --- The word most frequently attached to Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably pessimistic. His critics charge him with focusing on American racism’s intransigence, and overstating the power that white supremacy exerts on black life. […] The racial backlash that Obama engendered testifies to the fact that any attempt by black people to liberate themselves fundamentally threatens the American order. This is part of the glory of Barack Obama’s presidency, that black people possess the potential to recreate America as a true democracy. But the events that have followed the Obama presidency tell us that democracy’s advent will perhaps remain more of a potentiality than a reality, a protracted struggle that the nation will not resolve without enormous strength of political will. Eight Years in Power asks us to linger in that tension instead of dismissing it. Coates’s gradual drift away from post-racial hopes towards hard-nosed realism shows us that he has been in motion this whole time, not denying America’s capacity to change, but realizing how monumental the task before us is.

It may seem totally nuts now, but as far as who gets credit for simply being affected by black pain, it doesn’t seem very removed from our current world where we heap lavish praise on someone like Jon Stewart for announcing on the Daily Show that he was too heartbroken to make jokes after the Charleston church shooting, as if all throughout this country’s present and past, black people and people of color have not been so heartbroken and so violated that we were left humorless, or worse, dead. To praise Stewart as excessively as he was praised is to say to black people: Your pain is unexceptional and does not matter until a white man feels it too. What I want is to get paid for my labor and be credited for my excellence. What I want is to not have to be made aware that because most publications only ever make room for one or two writers of color when those publications publish me it means another excellent writer of color does not get to have that spot, and yes, we internalize that scarcity and it makes us act wild and violent toward each other sometimes instead of kind. Why are we so perversely interested in narratives of suffering when we read things by black and brown writers? Where are my carefree writers of color at? Seriously, where?