No one today has done more to push this theory in the mainstream than the 42-year-old author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Anyone interested in the durability of racism in American life is probably still discussing his breakout 2015 memoir “Between the World and Me,” a moving and despairing letter to his then-15-year-old son that warned: “You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels ... The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.” The book won Mr. Coates millions of readers and fans, many of whom are white.

This week he published “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy,” a collection of essays bridging the Obama and Trump eras, and here Mr. Coates deepens his vision of American sonderweg. Consider this extraordinary description he offers of a social process so multifaceted as neighborhood gentrification, which in urban areas like New York is far from a straightforwardly white phenomenon:

To empathize on any human level with the lynched and the raped, and then to watch all of the beneficiaries just going on with their heedless lives, could fill you with the most awful rage. I feel it myself, for example, walking through Washington, D.C., or Brooklyn, where gentrification has blown through like a storm. And I feel it not just because of the black people swept away but because I know that “gentrification” is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime.

In my own young black life, I have done my part to gentrify a half-dozen mixed neighborhoods ranging from Spanish Harlem to Fort Greene to the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Many of my well-educated black, Latino, Asian and Arab friends have done the same. Most of us harbored conflicted feelings about the processes we were engaged in, but few of us considered advancing white supremacy to be one of them. Mr. Coates, who formerly lived in Harlem, briefly catches himself in the essay, admitting, “And I know, even in my anger, even as I write this, that I am no better.” Yet in the very next sentence he abandons any pretense of class-based analysis. “White people are, in some profound way, trapped,” he doubles down. “It took generations to make them white, and it will take more to unmake them.”

So expansive is the racial netting we are wrapped in, Mr. Coates writes, “it’s likely that should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.” Elsewhere in the book he notes “that white supremacy was so foundational to this country that it would not be defeated in my lifetime, my child’s lifetime, or perhaps ever.”

Amazingly, despite his near godlike status within white liberal circles, in the collection’s finest essay, “The Case for Reparations,” originally published in The Atlantic in 2014, Mr. Coates worries that “today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything.” It is a jaw-dropping sentence if you take even a moment to consider the current discourse in progressive circles.

“We Were Eight Years in Power” can leave a reader with the distinct impression that its author is glad, relieved even, that Donald Trump was elected president. It is exhibits A through Z of Mr. Coates’s national indictment, proof that the foundations of the United States are anti-black and that the past is not dead — it’s not even past, to echo William Faulkner.