Who Were the 2010s?

As the decade began, there were reasons to be optimistic: America had elected its first black president, and the world hadn’t cascaded into total financial collapse. Obamacare, for all its flaws, was passed, and then came the Iran deal and the Paris climate accords. Sure, there were danger signs: the anger of the tea party, the slow hollowing out of legacy news media, a troubling sense that somehow the bankers got away with it. But then maybe the immediacy of social media gave some hope, at least if you listened to the chatter of the bright young kids in the Bay Area trying to build a new kind of unmediated citizenship. Maybe everyday celebrity, post-gatekeeper, would change the world for the better. Some of that happened. But we also ended up with the alt-right and Donald Trump, inequality, impeachment, and debilitating fomo. How did we get here? Throughout the past weeks, we had long talks over multiple sessions with six people who helped shape the decade—and were shaped by it—to hear what they’ve learned.

- Zak Cheney-rice, Stella Bugbee, Jonathan Van Meter, Max Read, Molly Young

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Race defined the decade.

BY ZAK CHENEY-RICE

IF THE RACIAL POLITICS of the 2010s has a definitive chronicler, it is Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose magisterial 2014 Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations” forced Americans to reckon with slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining. Since the essay’s publication—which eventually prompted a congressional hearing on the subject this year, at which Coates testified—the 44-year-old has won a National Book Award for his 2015 book, Between the World and Me, and was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. More recently, he’s been writing fiction: He scripted a run of Marvel’s Black Panther comic and published his celebrated first novel, The Water Dancer, which concerns an enslaved man gifted with supernatural powers in antebellum Virginia. Coates’s expansive imagination and incisive historically grounded writing about Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and cultural figures like Kanye West has cemented his status as a writer through whose eyes many Americans have come to understand the modern era—including me.

Let’s talk about race and politics in the 2010s.

It’s Obama’s 1 decade, unquestionably, which is not to say he was always the prime actor, but I think the force of a black president was such a seismic event that everything, including my conversation with you right now, just was touched by it. It’s really like if I had to pick a singular thing that defined the decade, it would probably be the thing that happened before the 2010s, and that was his election.

The actual start of the decade did mark the beginning of an ill-defined something in politics with the rise of the tea party. 2 How did 2010 affect your understanding of political partisanship? Is partisanship even a useful frame through which to understand racism?