A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

As much as I told myself in that moment that I was calling the cops on her behalf, I have no idea if she would’ve wanted me to make that call, or if it made her life any better.

THE UNITED STATES IS the most violent developed country in the world. It is also the most incarcerated. For more than four decades the second problem has grown, often under the guise of addressing the first.

America imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country, free or unfree, anywhere in the world, except the tiny archipelago of Seychelles.

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.

Black men aged 20 to 34 without a high school degree have an institutionalization rate of about 37 percent. For white men without a high school degree, it’s 12 percent, or nearly three times lower.

“As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he said. “We hear sirens in the night. . . . We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.”

He spoke amid an unfolding rights revolution in the nation’s courts, with the U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, strengthening the rights of criminal defendants as never before, most famously in its 1966 Miranda decision.

He recognized that his best bet was to cultivate white resentment with coded appeals, wrapped in gracious displays of equanimity and high-minded rhetoric about equality.

black activists and academics were in the midst of extended debate about the concept of internal colonialism and whether the state of black people in America was akin to a colonized people.

But whatever the academic debate on the topic, Nixon was correct that black Americans “don’t want to be a colony in a nation.” And yet he helped bring about that very thing. Over the half-century since he delivered those words, we have built a colony in a nation, not in the classic Marxist sense but in the deep sense we can appreciate as a former colony ourselves: A territory that isn’t actually free. 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.

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.

From India to Vietnam to the Caribbean, colonial systems have always integrated the colonized into government power, while still keeping the colonial subjects in their place.

Black people can live and even prosper in the Nation, but they can never be truly citizens.

None of this came about by accident. It was the result of accumulation of policy, from federal housing guidelines and realtor practices to the decisions of tens of thousands of school boards and town councils and homeowners’ associations essentially drawing boundaries: the Nation on one side, the Colony on the other.

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.”

If you released every African American and Latino prisoner in America’s prisons, the United States would still be one of the most incarcerated societies on earth.

A few days into the unrest that followed, an Iraq war vet tweeted a photo of himself next to one of a cop on the streets of Ferguson, noting, “The gentleman on the left has more personal body armor and weaponry than I did while invading Iraq.” Not just that: the cops in Ferguson were clad in head-to-toe camouflage, as if the olive and sandy brown color scheme would help them blend into the McDonald’s parking lot they were patrolling.

Colonists chased the king’s officers through the streets, caught them, beat them, tarred and feathered them, and wheeled them through town for all to mock and shame. As distant as it may seem now, that’s our national heritage when it comes to “lawful orders.”

But what was the Constitution doing, really, in Ferguson? It seemed an absurdly remote abstraction, as practical a piece of protection as reciting a poem into the barrel of a gun. And yet in a grand irony the document itself, and the nation it binds together, was born of almost the exact same set of grievances as those of the protesters getting teargassed in the streets of Ferguson.

the spark of the revolution was not so much taxation as the enforcement of a particular tax regime—in other words, policing.

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.

it. In a colonial system, you can have power and be close to those with power, or you can be humiliated.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the DOJ report is how open and honest the city officials are about their police department’s purpose, how certain they seem that no one is watching them.

The point is that none of the people administering this enterprise appear concerned that what they’re doing is a gross violation of their duty to their constituents. And when you ask yourself how this report came to be written, the reason for their nonchalance is evident. The damning pages of the report exist only because a seventeen-year-old black boy was shot and killed by a police officer, and because that shooting led to an uprising. That uprising in turn led to the DOJ getting involved, which in turn led to the investigation that produced this audit.

This is what “the law” looks like in the Colony, where real democratic accountability is lacking, when the consent of the governed is absent or forsaken or betrayed, and when the purpose of policing and courts isn’t the maintenance of safety and provision of justice but rather some other aim.

And so the maintenance of the Nation’s integrity requires constant vigilance. The borders must be enforced without the benefit of actual walls and checkpoints. This requires an ungodly number of interactions between the sentries of the state and those the state views as the disorderly class. The math of large numbers means that with enough of these interactions and enough fear and suspicion on the part of the officers who wield the gun, hundreds of those who’ve been marked for monitoring will die.

In a small working-class neighborhood in Staten Island, Garner would sell individual cigarettes—loosies—which are illegal in New York. In other words: Eric Garner, like John Hancock, was a merchant trafficking in black market goods.

Not long before Timothy Loehmann shot and killed Tamir Rice, the Department of Justice issued a scathing report on the Cleveland police department’s patterns and practices of discrimination and the use of force.

Forward operating base. That phrase captures the psychology of many police officers: they see themselves as combatants in a war zone, besieged and surrounded, operating in enemy territory, one wrong move away from sudden death.

But the existence of plunder as a motivation, even as the primary one, does not negate the subjective experience of white fear, the terror that individual white people experience and that white writers, preachers, and politicians cultivate socially and politically.

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

In the course of the last few years, I’ve had dozens and dozens of conversations with cops, but I’m always struck that for all the training and procedures that accompany being a member of a police force, each police officer has a shocking amount of latitude in any given situation. When I read the above Reddit post, I feel relief that the cop who answered the call to find two guys jumping their car had the good sense not to harass them. But who knows what another cop would’ve done?

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 the brute fact remains: soldiers aren’t judges or mayors or bureaucrats who have the experience, language skills, or basic relationships of kin and country to be able to navigate the extremely fraught local politics of a place they’ve never set foot in until their deployment.

We ask police to be social workers, addiction counselors, mental health workers, and community mediators. We wouldn’t hand a social worker a gun and have them go out into the streets to apprehend criminals, but we do the opposite every day.

According to statistics compiled by the Washington Post, in 2015 a full quarter of those shot and killed by police were suffering from mental illness.

That is not the case in the United States, where loud public arguments, indeed any displays of disorderliness, often carry more than a wisp of genuine danger, because you never know if the hothead who cut you off in traffic, or the drunk in the booth next to you at the bar, might be packing.

The Second Amendment, its most strenuous defenders like to tell us, is the ultimate check against tyranny. (This despite the fact that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world.)

If the people are armed enough to threaten the state’s control, then the state’s monopoly on violence is in question, and it therefore often acts less like it’s enforcing the law than putting down an insurrection.

American society has witnessed a kind of arms race between its citizens and its police, resulting in forces that in many places patrol and occupy rather than police, that straightforwardly view themselves as waging war.

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

Scholars of prisons often talk about the “punishment rate,” which is the number of inmates per one thousand reported crimes. It is a useful measure, because it captures how punitive the society is relative to how dangerous it is. Between 1960 and 1980, as the crime rate spiked and the existing system processed the increase, the punishment rate actually fell dramatically. That is, we locked up a relatively small percentage of people compared to the overall number of crimes committed. But starting in 1980, the punishment rate skyrocketed. And then, crucially, even as crime began to fall and then fell sharply in the mid-1990s, the incarceration rate continued to rise.

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.

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.

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.

the federal government could release every single nonviolent drug offender currently serving time in a federal prison, and the United States would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

John Pfaff,

The beat cop deciding to make an arrest, the local district attorney deciding to charge someone with five crimes carrying a max of forty years rather than one with a max of five—these are the individuals who comprise what we call the criminal justice system.

American criminal law is constructed, maintained, patrolled, and enforced through a highly distributed, at times byzantine and chaotic set of overlapping jurisdictions, interacting awkwardly with one another.