A Colony in a Nation Read online

  Nixon’s genius in 1968 was to reach back to the Founders and somehow find in that revolutionary generation a call for order. “The American Revolution was and is dedicated to progress, but our founders recognized that the first requisite of progress is order,” he said. “Now, there is no quarrel between progress and order—because neither can exist without the other.” In fact, “the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence, and that right must be guaranteed in this country.”

  This rhetoric and framing would become the template to justify forty years of escalating incarceration: Order is necessary for liberty to flourish. If we do not have order, we can have no other rights. It would dominate the politics of both parties over the next three decades, as crime continued to climb. Fear for one’s own body against a violent predator, for the sanctity and safety of one’s hearth against incursions by the depraved—these kinds of political issues operate far below the frontal cortex, deep beneath the dry talk of policy or tax rates. They are primal and primary. And in America, when the state cultivates such fear among relatively empowered white voters, it is enriching uranium for a political nuclear weapon.

  It was Ferguson, Missouri, that made me understand the sheer seductive magnetism of this simple idea. On the Thursday in August 2014 after Michael Brown was shot and killed, I was sitting in a car trying to pull out of a parking lot onto the town’s main thoroughfare and having no luck. The street was knotted with cars, lights blinking and horns honking. Young people sat on top of SUVs waving signs and blasting music. The scene wasn’t a protest so much as an impromptu street festival, a victory parade. Just two nights earlier about a hundred protesters had been met by dozens of heavily armed police from the surrounding areas, aiming assault weapons from their tactical vehicles. The ensuing events—seen through the lens of a smartphone—had had the air of warfare, or, more perniciously, the brutality of a third world dictatorship. Images like the instantly iconic photo of a young black man in dreads, hands raised in surrender in the face of six cops in camouflage and gas masks pointing their rifles at him, had so embarrassed the political class of Missouri that Governor Jay Nixon had ordered a black state trooper named Captain Ron Johnson to take over. His response was to massively scale back police presence, leading to this triumphant festival atmosphere.

  The scene before me was peaceful and, by and large, lawful: some weed here and there, but for the most part people were just partying. But if it was mostly lawful, it was not at all orderly. Traffic was snarled, horns and music were blaring, and people drank from open containers, as crowds threaded through the standstill traffic. Some deep, neurotic part of me took in the scene with unease, and I recalled the hostile questions Governor Nixon had faced from local reporters earlier that day at his press conference. While most of the national and international press corps had grilled Nixon on the garish spectacle of police officers equipped for war against a few dozen nonviolent protesters, the local press was attacking him from the other direction. Was the governor just going to abandon the streets to the thugs? Was he going to let Ferguson burn, as it had that first night after Brown’s death? Wasn’t he going to maintain order?

  As a few of my producers from MSNBC and I managed to pull between two cars and make a left away from the madness, I felt a new understanding of the phrase “law and order.” I’d always thought its political appeal lay in the law and all that that term meant: a nation of laws not of men; equal justice under law; the rule of law. But I realized in that moment that the phrase’s power lay in the second term, in the promise of order, where people walk on the sidewalks, not in the street; traffic flows smoothly; and music is played softly and discreetly. In Ferguson that order was being boisterously, furiously, fuck-you’ed. And the beneficiaries of that order—from the local reporters to the homeowners in leafy seclusion just a few blocks away—looked on in horror. I could sense their anxiety almost telepathically.

  Richard Nixon identified the problem America faced in 1968 as fundamentally a lack of order. And really who—black or white—can be against order? Who can stand against tranquility? Part of the genius of the rhetoric of law and order is that as a principle (rather than a practice), it can be sold as the ultimate call for equality: We all deserve the law. We all deserve order. All lives matter.

  But even if the rhetoric of order is the most enduring legacy of Nixon’s 1968 convention speech, that’s not, to my mind, the speech’s most important theme. Nixon understood that black demands for equality had to be acknowledged and given their rhetorical due. He promised “a new policy for peace and progress and justice at home,” and pledged that his new attorney general would “be an active belligerent against the loan sharks and the numbers racketeers that rob the urban poor in our cities.” “And let us build bridges, my friends,” he offered, “build bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black America from white America. Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.”

  A colony in a nation.

  Nixon meant to conjure an image of a people reduced to mere recipients of state handouts rather than active citizens shaping their own lives. And in using the image of a colony, he was, in his own odd way, channeling the zeitgeist. As anticolonial movements erupted in the 1960s, colonized people across the globe recognized a unity of purpose between their own struggles for self-determination and the struggle of black Americans. Black activists, in turn, recognized their own plight in the images of colonial subjects fighting an oppressive white government. America’s own colonial history was quite different from that of, say, Rhodesia, but on the ground the structures of oppression looked remarkably similar.

  In fact, 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. A year earlier Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton published Black Power, which argued explicitly that America’s ghettos were colonized and occupied and that black nationalism was the only route to true liberation. The concept had long roots: in 1935, W. E. B. DuBois had written of black people as a “nation within a nation.” Over the years, critics of the concept have noted the weaknesses of the framework in accounting for the distinct economic situation of African Americans and the changes in their representation and situation over time.

  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.

  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. Policing is a uniquely important and uniquely dangerous function of the state.* Dictatorships and totalitarian regimes use the police in horrifying ways; we call them “police states” for a reason. 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 her masterful 2010 chronicle of American mass incarceration
, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues convincingly that our current era represents not a shift from previous eras of white supremacy and black oppression but continuity with them. After the 1960s, she contends, when Jim Crow was dismantled as a legal entity, it was reconceived and reborn through mass incarceration. “Rather than rely on race,” she writes, “we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. . . . As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

  As I covered the unrest in Ferguson, Alexander’s analysis seemed undeniable. Clearly the police had taken on the role of enforcing an unannounced but very real form of segregation in the St. Louis suburb. Here was a town that was born of white flight and segregation, nestled in a group of similar hamlets that were notoriously “sundown towns,” where southern police made sure black people didn’t tarry or stay the night. And despite the fact that Ferguson’s residents were mostly black, the town’s entire power structure was white, from the mayor, to the city manager, to all but one school board member as well as all but one city council member, and to the police chief and the police force itself, which had three black cops out of fifty-three.

  Then just eight months later I was on the streets of Baltimore after yet another young black man died at the hands of police, and the stories and complaints I heard from the residents there sounded uncannily like those I’d heard in Ferguson. But if Ferguson’s unrest was clearly the result of a total lack of black political power, that didn’t seem to be the case, at least not at first look, in Baltimore: the city had black city council members, a black mayor, a very powerful black member of Congress, a black state’s attorney, and a police force that was integrated.

  If Ferguson looked like Jim Crow, Baltimore was something else. The old Jim Crow comprised twin systems of oppression: segregation across public and private spheres that kept black people away from social and economic equality, and systematic political disenfranchisement that made sure black citizens weren’t represented democratically. These twin systems required two separate pieces of landmark legislation to destroy, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

  Through ceaseless struggle and federal oversight, the civil rights movement ended de jure segregation and created the legal conditions for black elected political power—state representatives, black mayors, city council members, black police chiefs, even a few black senators and a black president. But this power has turned out to be strikingly confined and circumscribed, incorporated into the maintenance of order through something that looks—in many places—more like the centuries-old model of colonial administration.

  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.

  Half the cops accused of killing Freddie Gray were black; half were white. The Baltimore police chief is black, as is the mayor. And Freddie Gray, the figure upon whom this authority was wielded?

  Well, to those in the neighborhood, there was never any question what race he would be.

  In the era of the First Black President, black political power has never been more fully realized, and yet for so many black people blackness feels just as dangerous as ever. Black people can live and even prosper in the Nation, but they can never be truly citizens. The threat of the Colony’s nightstick always lingers, even for, say, a famous and distinguished Harvard professor of African American studies who suddenly found himself in handcuffs on his own stately porch just because someone thought he was a burglar.

  Race defines the boundaries of the Colony and the Nation, but race itself is a porous and shifting concept. Whiteness is nonexistent, yet it confers enormous benefits. Blackness is a conjured fiction, yet it is so real it can kill. In their brilliant 2012 collection of essays, 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. Over time these categories shift, both as reflections of those in power and as expressions of solidarity and resistance in the face of white supremacy.

  Because our racial categories are always shifting, morphing, disappearing, and reappearing, so too are the borders between the Colony and the Nation. In many places, the two territories alternate block by block, in a patchwork of unmarked boundaries and detours that are known only by those who live within them. It’s like the fictional cities of Besz´el and Ul Qoma in China Miéville’s gorgeous speculative fantasy detective novel The City & the City. Though the cities occupy the same patch of land, each city’s residents discipline themselves to unsee the landscape of their neighbor’s city.

  The two-block stretch where Michael Brown lived and died in Ferguson, the low-rise apartments home to Section 8 tenants that the mayor told me had been a “problem,” is part of the Colony. The farmers’ market a half-mile away, where the mayor was when Brown was shot, is part of the Nation. The west side of Cleveland where twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed while playing in a park is part of the Colony. The Westside of Baltimore, where Dayvon Love grew up and Freddie Gray died, is part of the Colony. The South Side of Chicago, where Laquan McDonald was shot and killed, is too.

  This is the legacy of a post-civil-rights social order that gave up on desegregation as a guiding mission and accepted a country of de facto segregation between “nice neighborhoods” and “rough neighborhoods,” “good schools” and “bad schools,” “inner cities” and “bedroom communities.” 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 Colony, violence looms, and failure to comply can be fatal. Sandra Bland, a twenty-eight-year-old black woman who died in a Texas prison cell in July 2015, was pulled over because she didn’t signal a lane change. Walter Scott, the fifty-year-old black man shot in the back three months earlier as he fled a North Charleston police officer, was pulled over because one of the three brake lights on his newly purchased car was out. Freddie Gray, the twenty-five-year-old resident of one of Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods whose spinal cord was snapped in a police van, simply made eye contact with a police officer and started to move swiftly in the other direction.

  If you live in the Nation, the criminal justice system functions like your laptop’s operating system, quietly humming in the background, doing what it needs to do to allow you to be your most efficient, functional self. In the Colony, the system functions like a computer virus: it intrudes constantly, it interrupts your life at the most inconvenient times, and it does this as a matter of course. The disruption itself is normal.

  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.”

  In the Nation, you can stroll down the middle of a quiet, carless street with no hassle, as I did with James Knowles, the white Republican mayor of Ferguson. We chatted on a leafy block in a predominantly white neighborhood filled with stately Victorian homes and wraparound porches. There were no cops around. We were technically breaking the law—you can’t walk in the middle of the street—but no one was going to enforce that law, because really what’s the point. Who were we hurting?

  In the Colony, just half a mile away, the di
sorderly act of strolling down the middle of the street could be the first link in the chain of events that ends your life at the hands of the state.

  The Colony is overwhelmingly black and brown, but in the wake of financial catastrophe, deindustrialization, and sustained wage stagnation, the tendencies and systems of control developed in the Colony have been deployed over wider and wider swaths of working-class white America. 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. And the makeup of those white prisoners is dramatically skewed toward the poor and uneducated. As of 2008, nearly 15 percent of white high school dropouts aged 20 to 34 were in prison. For white college grads, the rate was under 1 percent.

  Maintaining the division between the Colony and the Nation is treacherous precisely because the constant threat that the tools honed in the Colony will be wielded in the Nation; that tyranny and violence tolerated at the periphery will ultimately infiltrate the core. American police shoot an alarmingly high and disproportionate number of black people. But they also shoot a shockingly large number of white people.

  Even the most sympathetic residents of the Nation, I think, find it easy to think this is all someone else’s problem. Yes, of course, America is overincarcerated, of course the police killing unarmed black men is awful, and yes, of course I’d like to see all that change. But it’s fundamentally someone else’s issue.

  It’s not.

  Here’s why.

  * As sociologist Max Weber argued in Politics as a Vocation (1919), the state is the one institution that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.