Through our shared cultural inheritance, Americans convert white fear into policy. When the system receives a shock—a crime wave, a terrorist attack—and we must answer the question What is to be done, our collective response is punishment, toughness, and violence. We build a bureaucracy and vocabulary of toughness that then take on their own power, their own gravity and inertia. We then bequeath the institutions of toughness to the next generation of politicians and policy makers, even after the initial problem they were meant to solve has dissipated.
