A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

I was there to talk about policing and crime and the trauma of lives lived dodging both with no cover.

The total number of Americans under penal supervision, some have argued, even rivals the number of Russians in the gulag under Stalin. Nearly one out of every four prisoners in the world is an American, though the United States has just 5 percent of the world’s population.

Put another way: for white Americans, lethal violence is nearly as rare as it is in Finland; for black Americans, it’s nearly as common as it is in Mexico.

There are many theories as to why crime exploded during this period, and they vary significantly in their persuasiveness, but what mattered most politically was how easily politicians and then voters were able to make the connection between the unraveling of order and the violations of law. When people are allowed to take over the streets in protest, what’s to stop them from robbing and stealing and killing?

A place controlled from outside rather than within. A place where the mechanisms of representation don’t work enough to give citizens a sense of ownership over their own government. A place where the law is a tool of control rather than a foundation for prosperity. A political regime like the one our Founders inherited and rejected. An order they spilled their blood to defeat.

Race defines the boundaries of the Colony and the Nation, but race itself is a porous and shifting concept. Whiteness is nonexistent, yet it confers enormous benefits. Blackness is a conjured fiction, yet it is so real it can kill.

In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order. In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands. In the Nation, you are innocent until proven guilty; in the Colony, you are born guilty.

Thirteen years before the Declaration of Independence, British member of Parliament William Pitt defended the rights of Englishmen to privacy in their own home. He declared: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter—all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!”

Otis appeared before the Superior Court of Massachusetts to argue against the British use of writs of assistance, calling them the “worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law-book,” and “a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” His argument would stretch to five hours. John Adams, who was among those who’d packed into the courthouse to hear Otis, would later say: Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary rule of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.

Presented with a challenge to its power, an illegitimate regime will often overreact, driven by the knowledge that all they have is force.

To desecrate the dead is to humiliate the living, and humiliation may be the most powerful and most underappreciated force in human affairs. The angry citizen can shout, and the terrified citizen can lock the doors, or flee, or move, or arm himself. But the humiliated citizen can neither express her feelings nor respond to the offense. For it is in the nature of humiliation that it happens at the hands of someone with greater power: the police officer who pulls over the young black man behind the wheel and wants to hear no lip; the corrupt bureaucrat who comes to inspect the businessman’s shop, looking for violations; the surly immigration official who goes through the immigrant’s belongings.

The number of people in state and federal prisons serving drug sentences increased nearly 1,270 percent, from 24,000 inmates in 1980 to 304,500 in 2014. Years later Nixon aide John Ehrlichman seemed to offer up a smoking gun when he told a reporter: The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

This process was repeated in statehouses and city halls across the country: black people asked for social investment and got SWAT teams, asked for full employment and got gang units, asked for protection and got “stop and frisk.” White fear absorbed and appropriated black fear. Thanks to what scholars call “selective hearing,” black fear, combined with white political power, produced a state committed to managing and punishing black and brown subjects rather than empowering and protecting them.

Along with causing the Nation to undervalue the lives of those in the Colony, white fear also expresses the forbidden knowledge that all white people carry with them: We’ve got it better. And if white people have it better, then isn’t it only logical that black people will try to come and take what they have? “They were coming downtown from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance,” famed New York newspaper columnist Pete Hamill wrote of the group of young black men who had allegedly gang-raped and beaten a white woman jogging in Central Park in 1989. They were coming from a land with no fathers. . . . They were coming from the anarchic province of the poor. And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teeming with the violent images of the streets and the movies, they had only one goal: to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.

Incarceration in many states is actually declining, and the beginnings of something like a political consensus—however tenuous and uneasy—has formed, between left and right, that locking up millions of our own citizens has been an expensive, tragic, and embarrassing mistake. But the law and order demagoguery of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, its aggressive celebration of white fear—of terrorists, immigrants, and black criminals—shows just how weak that consensus is. Because white fear is always waiting in the wings.

“Over the course of the last two centuries,” Whitman writes, “in both Germany and France, and indeed throughout the continent of Europe, the high-status punishments have slowly driven the low-status punishments out. . . . These countries are the scene of a leveling-up egalitarianism—an egalitarianism whose aim is to raise every member of society up in social status.”