A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

Three things happened in the 1960s to shape the politics of how and upon whom we enforce law.

first was the success of the civil rights movement in beginning to dislodge decades of Jim Crow and crack open the vise of American racial hierarchy. This hard-fought success also produced intense, even violent white backlash, widespread fragility, and resentment at the social order being unmade.

second was a once-in-a-century crime rate increase that would l...

third thing was that even as white backlash was gaining strength and crime was on the rise, street protests were exploding.

when Nixon invoked “a colony in a nation” 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.

American criminal justice isn’t one system with massive racial disparities but two distinct regimes. One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land.

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen and Barbara Fields trace the semantic trick of racial vocabulary, which invents categories for the purpose of oppression while appearing to describe things that already exist out in the world.

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

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.

Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.

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

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

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. In north St. Louis County that aim is to produce revenue, the same aim of the British Empire’s customs regime in the American colonies.

fear is not some excuse for savagery, cruelty, and sadism but is fundamentally inseparable from it. Hurt people hurt people, as the old saying goes. And the truly terrified commit atrocities.

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.

Despite the fact nonwhite people are disproportionately the victims of crime, the criminal justice system as a whole is disproportionately built on the emotional foundation of white fear.

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 harshness of criminal sentencing. In 1984 President Reagan signed the Sentencing Reform Act, which established mandatory minimum sentences that constrained judicial discretion. In 1986 Congress passed laws creating a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

Prosecutors have tremendous discretion over which cases to bring and which to drop, whether to throw the book or slap the wrist. “You have to focus as much on the culture as the law,” he says. “Prosecutors are part of a culture that has expectations about crime toughness, and when you combine that with their tremendous amount of latitude, you get staggering punitiveness.”

White fear is both a social fact and something burned into our individual neural pathways.

In experimental settings, people of all races perceive black people as more threatening than people of other races, but the effect is particularly exaggerated with white respondents.

The point of these experiments is to test our deepest, least conscious, most hardwired reactions to people of different races. Time and time again they uncover that even those with egalitarian racial politics possess unconscious bias.

masterful book Ghettoside, argues that this inability to solve and punish the most serious crimes is the flip side of a system that overpunishes minor infractions.

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

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. Because white fear is a constant, because it persists even when

The Colony pays tribute to the Nation. The citizens enjoy tangible gains at the expense of the subjects, even though, or especially when, those gains aren’t material. While in some clear cases quantifiable dollars move from one realm to the other, a certain psychological expropriation, a net transfer of well-being, is far more common and far more insidious.