Summary

Coates expands the idea of plunder in "Notes from the Fourth Year." According to Coates, "America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackles to plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered" (86). Plunder offers an in to some understanding of the rage African Americans feel as they contemplate the aftermath of history and and the refusal of whites to reckon with that history. Coates highlights the aftermath of the impact of white supremacy on black lives by pointing to gentrification, a contemporary phenomenon, and older forms of discrimination like Jim Crow laws. White supremacy has been around so long that whites are effectively trapped in their historical identities...