On the evening of October 7, almost every seat in the Heller Auditorium was filled with people from across Chicago who came to hear American author Ta-Nehisi Coates speak about his newest book, on racism during Obama’s presidency,  “We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy.” Seated in front of the half-finished set for the Parker fall play, Coates was interviewed by WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore, who also spoke at Parker last March.

Seated on stage in front of the half-finished fall play set, Coates looked out on the auditorium. Ankles crossed and elbows resting on his knees, Coates chatted with Moore as more seats filled. Audience members, red book cover in hand, were led into the event by high school ushers.

Coates, a National Book Award winner for his 2015 “Between the World and Me,” was brought to Parker through the Family Action Network (FAN). FAN has also brought other notable speakers to Parker such as Congressman John Lewis last March. According to the official FAN website, “The Family Action Network (FAN) connects parents, educators and professionals through collaborative programming that educates, inspires and positively impacts the broader community.”

Coates’s newest book is a collection of essays, a majority of which were published in “The Atlantic,” all written between 2008 and 2016. The essays focus not only on the unprecedented election of Obama, but also a wide range of voices, movements, and ideas that all emerged from his presidency.

Many of the essays focus on how the rest of the country viewed Obama during his time in power. “I think one of the ways people criticize Barack Obama, and I have my equal share of critiques as well, one of the things they say is ‘Well there was no substance– it was just symbolism,’” Coates said in response to a question posed by Moore. “And I tell them symbolism is not just symbolism. If it meant something that you had an unbroken string of white male presidents, and we all made sure that it did, when that string is broken, it must mean something too.”

Coates continued to explain how he often finds that people don’t fully understand what Obama’s presidency really meant. “The problem is, it doesn’t mean as much as people want it to mean,” Coates said. “It means something– it means that for me, among other things, that if you are African American and you’re really, really smart, and you work really, really hard, and you get really, really lucky– like the country is falling apart and there is no one else to turn to– you might be president. And that wasn’t true 30 years ago.”

For Coates, Obama symbolizes actual change in this country. “There were a whole crop of politicians before Barack Obama that could have been Barak Obama, but it was not their time,” Coates said. “You have to say something has changed. Something is clearly different. It’s not everything, it’s not the wealth gap, but it’s something.”

In much of Coates’s writing, both his newest collection of essays and other publications, Coates writes about how the history of slavery in this country, specifically the money involved, is too often unseen, or sugar-coated. “There’s a lot of talk about the heart– it’s always moral appeal, good people, racism is a cancer, American heart,” Coates said. “It’s a very sentimentalist kind of take. What people don’t understand is that slavery was a big business. They didn’t want to say it that way. And I didn’t want to say it that way.”

Coates explained to the crowd, as he does at many of his lectures, how much economic weight the slave trade held at the start of the Civil War. “You have four million enslaved black people in the country at the start of the civil war,” Coates said. “At the time, those slaves put together were worth 3 billion dollars– about 75 billion in today’s dollars. If you try to extract that wealth out of the country, you just don’t have the same country.”

Coates’s interview with Moore soon expanded to and during his childhood in Baltimore the country today. “I lived in a neighborhood that you would not think that two parents who worked would,” Coates said. “I didn’t understand why at the time. But it’s relatively normal for ‘black middle class’ to live at a totally different level.”

Coates then took his comments to a broader scale. “If you systematically wall off a group of people, if you deprive them of resources, by law– it happens both in the private and public sector– if those people have a history even before that of being deprived wealth, as I argued in ‘The Case for Reparations,” and you have extremely relaxed gun laws in your country, things will come out of that,” Coates said. “One of the problems is we discuss this as a black issue, and it’s not. It has nothing to do with the color of my skin.”

Towards the end of the event, Coates opened up the floor questions. At the balcony microphone, junior Felicia Miller asked a question relating to an experience she had had with a previous speaker at Parker. “I remember last year we had a man who was Muslim come and speak on the stage,” Miller said. “One thing he specifically mentioned was that he had grown a beard so that people would recognize his ethnicity and so that he could explain that his beard didn’t link him to terrorism. I remember sitting next to my mother, who has dark skin, and she turned to me and said, ‘That’s not my responsibility to prove to people that I am not a terrorist or of that group.’”

Using the story to of a past experience, Miller then asked Coates her question. “Whose responsibility do you think it is to dispel racism?” Miller said. “And if it is only the majority group’s responsibility, do you think they are capable of doing that without assistance? Will they figure it out by themselves?’”

Coates looked down, laughing, before he answered. He said,“Will white people figure it out by themselves? I think if you are an American citizen you have the responsibility to do all you can to dispel racism.”

Dawn Halbert, one of the many people who came to the event, had never read any of Coates’s work before coming to Parker. Her interest was sparked after she heard a segment about his newest novel on NPR the previous week. Halbert said, “I kept telling my husband, ‘I’ve got to go get it! I’ve got to go get it!’”

Halbert felt that the issues Coates brought up during his interview were pertinent to the US today. “Oh, it was amazing,” Halbert said. “I thought a lot of his points were very poignant and obvious. Sometimes the truth is sitting there right in front of your face, but you can’t see it. People just choose to see what they want to see.”

Senior Molly Weinberg was one of the volunteer ushers at the Coates event. The job involved getting people to the auditorium, handing out copies of Coates’s newest book, gratis provided by Parker, to everyone who attended and then distributing a survey about the evening at the end of the event.

Weinberg, had already read “Between the World and Me” for her “Literature Post-Truth” class taught by upper school english teacher Matt Laufer. “You’re reading this book about someone’s very distinctive truth, and it’s kind of different from other books we’re reading in class that are written to have that misleading kind of feel to it,” Weinberg said. “In ‘Twelve Angry Men,’ another book we’re looking at, you’re reading it, and you’re missing a huge chunk of information, but with Coates, here’s this guy talking to his son about what his son needs to know about his life as a black man in the United States.”

Weinberg enjoyed reading Coates in her class and was interested in hearing him speak at Parker. “It was kind of hard to read it as a relatively privileged white girl who lives a very different experience than the one Coates is describing to his son,” Weinberg said. “I really liked it, and I thought it was really well-written.”

After reading and writing about Coates’s work, Weinberg was really excited to see him speak live. She was especially interested in Coates’s ability to keep the crowd engaged while still talking about very serious issues. “I was very surprised by how light-hearted he was,” Weinberg said. “I thought he was going to be a lot more stern because in ‘Between the World and Me’ he came off as a lot more cynical. He was joking around and smiling, and I wasn’t expecting that from him.”