My sister and I share a room in a suburban area of Maryland. As I walked into our room I noticed a book, which I knew to be hers on account of I’d never seen it before. It had a simple, yet interesting cover that read: A COLONY IN A NATION. The words “a colony” appeared in white letters against a black background while the words “in a nation” appeared in black lettering against a white background. Naturally, I thought to myself interesting; this book is either going to be about European colonialism from the 15th to the 20th century–which to be quite honest would be boring yet informational–or it would elaborate on the relationship between blacks and whites in America–which to be quite honest I’ve heard enough about these days, and yet fear I might miss something and appear ignorant in conversations that are bound to unfold in this political climate. Therefore, either way I was down for the ride of reading it. What follows are just some quotes from each chapter of the book and my thoughts about them/the information they convey. Enjoy!
*no copyright infringement intended*
Chapter 1
“THIS BOOK MAKES a simple argument: that 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.” Personally, I appreciate writers who are transparent about their material. Hayes literally states the whole premise of the book as an argument about the racial imbalance in the American criminal justice system being a direct effect of a dual system of governance–the former being the Nation and the later being the Colony. Hayes claims that people who live in the Nation enjoy the rights inherent in our humanity, and more often than not are also the people whose humanity is respected. Conversely, people who live in the Colony constantly get their humanity called into question, are disregarded, and do not enjoy the same rights as their fellow man who lives in the Nation.
“Colonial systems have always integrated the colonized into government power, while still keeping the colonial subjects in their place.” In other words colonial powers usually unite with certain colonial subjects to not only give the semblance of self-governance, but also to keep tabs on the colonial subjects to ensure they do not rise above their station. By doing so, power remains in the hands of the wealthy, which in the context of colonialism is synonymous with white.
“Black people can live and even prosper in the Nation, but they can never be truly citizens.” Okay, so at this point I was like… so I was right about this book being a commentary on black-white relations! Yes, I could have read the book’s jacket, but what’s the fun in that? Anyway this statement reminded me of an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History. I’m referring specifically to episode 6 from season 3 titled “The Hug Heard Round the World”. I highly recommend listening to it here. Not going to go too deep in detail now, but basically the episode is about how Sammy Davis Jr. worked his whole life to fit in to the Nation only to be reminded that he was nothing more than a member or the Colony. Sammy Davis Jr. is just one example though, and an old one at that. For more recent examples look no further than Henry Louis Gates (the Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home–officially he was charged with disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped), Lolade Siyonbola (Yale student who had the cops called on her for napping in a lounge), Erika Martin (black woman who had the police called on her at a Safeway–she was helping a homeless man), and I can go on–but there’s more to cover.
Hayes compares and contrasts the two systems within the context of the criminal justice system. Hayes compares the criminal justice system in the Nation to a laptop’s operating system while contrasting it with a computer virus in the Colony. Like the laptop operating system, people in the Nation do not have to give much thought to the criminal justice system. People in the Nation know it exits, and they may participate in it, but that is because the system doesn’t seek to target them. The system seeks to help make their lives livable. For people in the Nation however, the criminal justice system targets them maliciously like a virus. The system is an <I gotcha>, not a <c’mon man let’s do better next time>. Ultimately citizens of the Nation benefit while citizens of the Colony suffer.
Chapter 2
“Presented with a challenge to its power, an illegitimate regime will often overreact, driven by the knowledge that all they have is force.” If memory serves me correctly this is the part of the book where Hayes addresses the militarization of the police. Of course law enforcement is not illegitimate in and of themselves, but there exist members within their ranks who possess questionable motives, and harbor unchecked biases. As a result, we’ve become spectators of the deaths of human beings from the Colony.
Frantz Fanon: “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.” I had no idea who Frantz Fanon was prior to reading this book. Fanon was a West-Indian, specifically from Martinique, psychoanalyst and philosopher. When I read this quote from Fanon I thought three things. The first, I have to finish reading King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild. The second, did Malcolm X draw some of his rhetoric from Fanon?
I googled and found that Malcolm X was influenced by Fanon. Brownie points to me for making that connection. The final thought was I half agree and half disagree with the statement. The premise of colonialism was to grow empires, increase the number of taxable subjects, and extract resources to boost wealth. I want to be clear I think colonialism was a horrible practice, and in order for it to exist people had to make it a thinking machine. In order for royal houses to profit there had to be people who thought through policies to maximize profit. Where I do agree with Fanon is that colonialism was an act of violence; it facilitated a lot of violence against indigenous peoples. I was no history major, but from the colonies I knew and read about they all met a violent end. Wars for independence were fought.
Chapter 3
The main point I got from this chapter was law enforcement espouses a “warrior world view”. What’s a warrior world view? It is the belief that when operating in poor urban areas law enforcement officials behave as if they were in a war zone. The danger in this view is that every citizen in the poor urban area is perceived as a threat. People fear threats, and people can behave irrationally as a result of threats–whether those threats are real or perceived.
Chapter 4
How can we live in a representative democracy and treat citizens according to some binary code of behavior? In a word, fear. Fear is the motivating factor. The fear to which Hayes refers is specific, he calls it white fear. Hayes writes, “It is more than ‘fear in general’ that maintains the Colony. It is, in fact, a very specific type of fear: white fear.” However, I believe that there is another word that goes hand in hand with fear in feeding the binary system of the Colony and the Nation, lies.
As Hayes explains the War on Drugs and its disproportionate affect on people from the Colony, I was particularly struck by the excerpt he included from one of former president Richard Nixon’s aides, John Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman said: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people…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.” Honestly, it blows my mind that lies can drive policy, and politicians attempt to spin those policies into being informed by truth. Like, what?
But, for every lie there are willing and ready listeners prepared to accept those falsehoods as truths. “No single actor or group of actors created mass incarceration, and no single group of actors can undo it,” writes Hayes. He’s right. There are a lot of moving pieces within the criminal justice system. There’s the law, the police, the prosector, the judge, the jury, and every citizen in the United States who feeds into the system whether it is through active participation or tacit approval.
“Black fear combined with white political power, produced a state committed to managing and punishing black and brown subjects rather than empowering and protecting them.” In my interpretation of the text, black fear is the term applied to black citizens who live in underserved communities with high crime rates that want safer communities–which often translates to higher police involvement. So, this quote speaks to the double whammy of black people living in dangerous communities wanting protection from law enforcement and actual justice from the criminal justice system linked to it, but also being subjected to the inequities within both systems that result from unchecked biases. Everyone has biases, but when biases go unchecked and unchallenged they can lead to catastrophic events. I also want to mention here the quote at the onset of this paragraph closely relates to a quote mentioned earlier: “Colonial systems have always integrated the colonized into government power, while still keeping the colonial subjects in their place.” There are black people living in dangerous communities, black people in law enforcement, black people in Congress, and black people in the legal system–but all of us are members of the Colony.
“When those outside the Colony point with derision at the violence within it to justify its continued existence, they reinforce how undervalued black lives are.” As the old saying goes, for every finger you point at something, there are three more pointing back at you. We cannot justify injustice. The violence we see is a symptom of a bigger issue. We continue to see violence in under-resourced communities because we do not address the core issues as a country. We should be asking ourselves, why aren’t we addressing the core issues? Which brings us to Hayes’ next point.
Hayes offers us one theory–white fear. “White fear emanates from knowing that white privilege exists and the anxiety that it might end.” In order to address the real problems within the Colony–the marginalization and systematic oppression of its subjects–people would have to not only acknowledge that there are inequalities and inequities within our current system, but also actively work to address those inequalities and inequities. Essentially all who benefit from white privilege would have to give up some or all of the perks to create a more just system. In other words, real change in theory would necessitate altruism, and how many beneficiaries of white privilege are altruistic? I honestly do not know how one would even go about measuring such a thing.
“White fear is a collaborative production.” Hayes previously provided an excerpt from the New York columnist Pete Hamill on the Central Park Five case from 1989, in which Hamill employs othering when describing the defendants as “they” and continues to perpetuate stereotypes about the black community (for example, growing up without fathers), prior to dropping this nugget of wisdom.
Fear is a collaborative production. I remember reading somewhere that there are only two natural fears in humans, falling and loud noises. Which makes sense those two phenomena present potential danger, and as part of the animal kingdom our primary goal in life is to survive which requires identifying potential danger then fighting it or fleeing from it. All other fears are learned, reinforced, and accepted as fact. The collaborative production of white fear to which Hayes refers requires learning (someone has to share/teach the idea), reinforcement (someone has to provide examples to support their assertion of the legitimacy of that fear), and acceptance (there has to be willing parties ready to receive the messages and accept them as fact, even if the fear stems from opinion).
Chapter 5
*Headshot of Chris Hayes. The author of A Colony in a Nation. No copyright infringement intended for the above image.*
“We directly, materially, personally benefit from the status quo, no matter what awful costs it imposes on those in the Colony.” Hayes actually started the book out with an anecdote from his college years. Hayes forgot he was carrying weed in his bag when he had to pass a security checkpoint for an event at the Republican National Convention which his future-father-in law was covering as a journalist. Hayes was freaking out that he’d get arrested when his bag was searched, but he wasn’t. Security not only let him through, but they also let him keep the weed– much to Hayes’ surprise. Yet, Hayes acknowledges that the reaction might have been different had he not been a person who benefits from white privilege.
Bear with me as I digress to make a text to self connection. I’m a black woman, and I would be deluding myself if I said I do not in any way benefit from the status quo. I may not have white privilege, but I do have some privileges that have undoubtedly assisted me in life. For example: I am from a middle to upper-middle class background, my parents were both college educated (my father has a doctoral degree), I grew up in a suburban neighborhood, and I speak using Standard American English.
Have I ever been pulled over by the police? Yes. The officer had every right to pull me over. I did not have my headlights on in the evening (I noticed like five minutes into driving and switched them on, but the cop saw me before I put them on so, my bad). The real question is have I ever had cause to fear for my life being pulled over by the police? Not really. But it probably helped that I was wearing a North Face jacket, driving a beige Jaguar, and was a young woman with a familiar speech pattern. In hindsight I was probably over polite. I smiled the whole time, narrated everything I was doing to comply with the officers instructions (for example, I kept my purse in the back seat and told him if he looked in the backseat he’d see my purse was there, and I needed to reach back to get it in order to pass him my license), there was a fruit tart from Whole Food in the backseat as well, and I thanked him after the whole exchange was over.
I still live in the suburb where I grew up. I believe our law enforcement officers are well trained and kind, but I always err on the side of caution when interacting with them. I do not make sudden movements; I am friendly and polite regardless of my actual mental state. I may live in the Nation, but as I am a citizen of the Colony. I overcompensate when interacting with law enforcement because I know what could happen if I do not.
At the end of the day, Hayes’ ability to walk away from the weed incident with the benefit of the doubt from security and police, and the fact that I do not fear the police in my neighborhood comes at a cost. Our comforts come with the reality that other people encounter discomfort, harassment, abuse, and in the most extreme of cases death. The question is, now knowing what we know do we continue with the status quo or do we take action fueled by the fiery rage of injustice?
Chapter 6
Of course we should be outraged by injustice. Simply because we are not directly impacted by injustice does not mean that we allow it to continue. One interesting point brought up in Chapter 6 is that of the law professor James Whitman. James Whitman deals with the concept of leveling up justice. What is leveled up justice? Well, from a historical standpoint outlined by Hayes and Whitman, the wealthy have always benefitted from a legal system that handled them kindly while the less-than-well-to-do received harsher punishments. Leveling up is the idea that you bring the people who were disproportionally mistreated up to the level of the disproportionately well treated. The end result is a less punitive system. Most criminal justice systems in Europe have this leveled up approach. But, what about the United States? Naturally, we do the opposite. We level down. We want people who commit crimes to be punished period (of course the way laws are written and courts are set up can still offer benefits for the well-to-do like less jail-time, but that’s a story for another day).
“What kind of justice system would exist in a setting in which each member of society were actually valued as a full human with tremendous potential, even if he or she committed a crime, or hurt someone, or broke the community’s norms and were held accountable”? I believe if we had such a system we could get to the point in our society where there were fewer issues because we would directly be dealing with the root causes of crime. In the end, we’d probably have a more just society and a kinder one.
“But if there’s one thing I’ve come to believe, it is that much of the cause of our current state of affairs lies in our tasking the police with preserving order rather than with ensuring safety. Order is a slippery thing: it’s in the eyes of the beholder and the judgements of the powerful. Safety is clearer: it’s freedom from violence and intrusion.” Hayes claims the issues we’ve been seeing in the media, particularly with regard to law enforcement officers’ interactions with unarmed black males, is partially the result of citizens of the Nation not using the police properly. The police are meant to ensure our safety as people, not preserve order according to the opinion of some people. In fact, some citizens of the Nation call law enforcement when they could easily talk to whomever they perceive to be disturbing the order. What ever happened to polite conversations?
In closing I’ll leave you with the closest thing I have to a call to action line from Hayes, “the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves”. We cannot as Americans continue to believe that our current circumstances are the result of luck any more than our future circumstances are. If we want to see a better America then we have to build it ourselves, together.