A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

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.