A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

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.

They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.”

But the terrifying truth is that we as a people have created the Colony through democratic means. We have voted to subdue our fellow citizens; we have rushed to the polls to elect people promising to bar others from enjoying the fruits of liberty. A majority of Americans have put a minority under lock and key.

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. Police officers tasked with keeping these two realms separate intuitively grasp of the contours of this divide: as one Baltimore police sergeant instructed his officers, “Do not treat criminals like citizens.”

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!”

when the state declares some popular good illicit, a good that enjoys widespread normalized usage, the state must pursue ever more draconian means to snuff it out.

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.

FOR SUBJECTS OF AUTHORITARIAN rule, humiliation is the permanent state of existence.

“colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

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.

“We have allowed death to change its name from Southern rope to Northern dope.

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

Even to this day, the discussion around homelessness in major cities, New York included, focuses primarily on the problem of nonhomeless people seeing too many homeless people, not on the problem of too many people lacking homes.