A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.

THE UNITED STATES IS the most violent developed country in the world. It is also the most incarcerated.

But the particular system we have now—the sprawling alternative state of jails, prisons, probation, penal supervision, warrants, “stop and frisk,” “broken windows” policing, and the all-too-frequent shooting of the unarmed—dates back to the late 1960s.

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.

The problem with raising, say, property taxes is that the most engaged, empowered citizens will revolt against it. So instead, why not just squeeze all you can out of a smaller, less powerful group of citizens by raising the revenue through enforcement? The citizens receive municipal services, and the subjects have to pay for them. King George III succumbed to the same temptation.

To desecrate the dead is to humiliate the living, and humiliation may be the most powerful and most underappreciated force in human affairs.

And here’s the thing. It’s not an act. I’m sure Timothy Loehmann was indeed terrified. That fear, the fear of the occupying solider, is the entire problem.

To be outnumbered and afraid in a land not your own, and to attempt to bring it under your control—this is the great recurring theme of the American project, and it is shot through at every moment by fear and violence and subjugation. That fear stalks our history’s winners even as they conquer and conquer and settle and conquer some more.

Hurt people hurt people, as the old saying goes. And the truly terrified commit atrocities.

The typical cadet training involves sixty hours on how to use a gun and fifty-one hours on defensive tactics, but just eight hours on how to calm situations without force.

But take a second and ask yourself why this was considered something for the police to handle to begin with. “If a mental health unit with paramedics, nurses, or even doctors had been sent to help Anthony (instead of an officer with a gun) he would still be alive today,”

Policing in an environment awash in guns is fundamentally different from policing in one that isn’t.

But the difference in Bologna, and almost everywhere else in Europe and Asia, is the near total absence of guns. A gun has transformational power.

There simply aren’t very many guns in Japan. (Japanese police only began carrying guns in 1946—at the insistence of the American military.)

We are now a nation in which SWAT teams armed like special forces in Afghanistan show up at quiet homes in the dark of night, shoot dogs, and terrify residents, all to bust someone for growing pot.

Indeed, after every major mass shooting event, just as sure as the cameras flock to the scene and a national debate about gun violence briefly reemerges, gun sales spike. It turns out that wall-to-wall coverage of people being brutally killed by a gun is the best of all advertisements for gun sales.

It is more than “fear in general” that maintains the Colony. It is, in fact, a very specific type of fear: white fear.

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.

Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

There’s strong evidence that white and black people use marijuana at identical rates, and yet black people are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, and in some states, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, they are up to eight times as likely to be arrested.

In laboratory studies white people rate children of all races equally “innocent” until about age ten, when the innocence of black children suddenly fades, while that of white children endures.

Racial fear lives in the deepest part of our psyches. It lurks in our synapses.

This is the central component of the white fear that sustains the Colony: the simple inability to recognize, deeply, fully totally, the humanity of those on the other side.

To deny Freddie Gray his innocence is part of the machinery of repression that makes white fear so potent. 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?

White fear emanates from knowing that white privilege exists and the anxiety that it might end.

We are wired to identify threats, not to process statistics.

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.

This system of order maintenance, in which unruly citizens are marked and sorted, in which seediness is kept at bay, so that the Nation can stay pristine and inviting, confers tremendous benefits, wealth, and comfort on some and widespread harassment and misery on others.

All the while, deep poverty, routine lethal violence, and epidemic levels of trauma persist in the Colony. There citizens find themselves pushed further toward the geographical margins, squeezed both by the punishing arithmetic of poverty and by the ceaseless surveillance of a police force tasked with corralling that poverty and keeping order in places the Nation has not yet annexed.

And we are, of course, the only rich democracy that hands out the ultimate punishment: death. Year after year, when the dead around the world have been tallied, the beheadings and the hangings and firing squads and lethal injections, we join Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Somalia, North Korea, and China.

That’s because elite four-year schools are understood by almost everyone involved in them—parents, students, faculty, administrators—as places where young adults act out, experiment, and violate rules in all kinds of ways. And that’s more or less okay, or even more than okay; sometimes it’s encouraged.

Our discussion of policing and criminal justice is rightly focused on race and racial disparity. But the entire system is out of control.

BUT WHAT IF WE saw everyone in the Colony the same as we do the bright-eyed future swimming star? What if we were to agree human beings are not defined by the worst thing they ever did?

But in Ferguson they were clear; 12 percent of the municipal revenue was raised through tickets. That money was coming disproportionately from the town’s black citizens, which meant white people were able to pay lower taxes and make up the difference through harassment of people who didn’t look like them.

In cueing voters to associate immigration with criminality, white fear can be set to work its hypnotic magic on immigration the way it has on the “inner city.” Having primed their constituents to fear the denizens of the Colony, politicians sold white people on ever more punitive policies as a means of erecting a barrier that would keep out the hordes.

To the president and his political movement, crime is not a problem to be solved. It is a weapon to be wielded.

Trump is a symptom as much as a cause.

His appeal works because it channels the elemental force of American politics. Getting rid of him will be far easier than purging the Nation of the scourge of white fear.

White fear is a potent force in American politics, but it is not unconquerable.