A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

  Our discussion of policing and criminal justice is rightly focused on race and racial disparity. But the entire system is out of control. The policing of the Colony has breached the levee and flooded the Nation. SWAT teams are called out in caravans of military vehicles to knock down doors and shoot dogs in the heart of white America, too.

  White Americans are more likely to be killed by cops than their peers in any other Western democracy. This is particularly true of poor white and working-class white people. In fact, the places with the highest rates of white incarceration are the most punitive states, those in the conservative Deep South. The result? The states of the Old Confederacy have the least amount of racial discrepancy in their incarceration rates. The ratio of the incarceration rates for black people to white people in Louisiana is 4 to 1. In Mississippi it’s 3 to 1. In Wisconsin it’s 12 to 1; in New Jersey 12.2 to 1.

  The incarceration rate just for white Americans is still two and a half times the rate of France. Meaning white America, the Nation, the place free of the worst excesses of law and order and occupation, is still putting its citizens under lock and key at more than twice the rate of its continental cohort. In fact, if white America were its own country, it would have the sixteenth-highest incarceration rate in the world. This is the result of the American impulse to level down.

  BUT WHAT IF WE saw everyone in the Colony the same as we do the bright-eyed future swimming star? What if we were to agree human beings are not defined by the worst thing they ever did? Yes, there are incorrigibles and sociopaths. There are pathologically dangerous people who are a threat to those around them, no matter what you try to do to rehabilitate them. But there are far, far fewer of them than are currently crammed twelve to a room in our prisons.

  As a full-scale epidemic of opioid addiction has spread through white America, some of the most punitive rhetoric, the staple of how politicians talk about crime, has started to unravel. The images of addicts as dangerous incorrigibles are being replaced by images of high school prom queens lost to the demon of heroin. The shift is striking; the new language of forgiveness is the direct opposite of how Americans reacted to the spike in crack cocaine use among largely inner-city black populations in the late 1980s.

  “In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs,” the New York Times reported:

  While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites. . . . And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin—many of them in the suburbs and small towns—are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease.

  Politicians running for president during the long primary season held town hall after town hall where they counseled family members of addicts, spoke with compassion about the addicts in their own family, and called for treatment, funding, and understanding. This was particularly striking on the Republican side of things, a party more strongly associated with get-tough-on-crime rhetoric.

  New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor, became something of a viral sensation for his impassioned calls for empathy in the face of suffering. He would discuss his mother’s own smoking habit on the trail, saying that when she got sick with lung cancer “no one came to me and said, ‘Don’t treat her ’cause she got what she deserved.’ ” Christie would also often speak of a friend who died of an overdose. “There but for the grace of God, go I,” he said. “It can happen to anyone. And so we need to start treating people in this country and not jailing them. We need to give them the tools they need to recover. Because every life is precious. Every life is an individual gift from God. We have to stop judging, and give them the tools they need to get better.”

  Stop judging, and give them the tools they need to get better. Think of any other context where this is the guiding ethos of our crime policy.

  Imagine a person commits a crime, perhaps even a violent crime, against you. Is this person a human being? A neighbor, a fellow citizen? What do we as a society owe that person? Could he be someone you know and love in the throes of addiction? Or is he a member of a group you’ll never encounter again? What dignity is due the perpetrator and the potential perpetrator? Do you and the perpetrator belong to the same country? This is the question before us. The question we’ve answered wrongly for too long.

  Right now the person I conceive as my possible assailant does not inhabit the same Nation as I do. He is in the Colony, and our entire project for decades has been to keep him there. Subtly but unmistakably we have moved the object of our concern from crime to criminals, from acts to essences. It is the criminal, the bad guy, the irredeemable thug, around whom we craft our policy. We must keep him at bay. He is not a man who committed a bad act. He is not a full soul who did something horrible. He is the crime. He is a criminal. He is a subject of the Colony. Citizens can be full human beings; citizens can get second chances; citizens can be forgiven. Subjects are unforgivable.

  In Ferguson on the third night of protests, I was out in the streets, broadcasting live. We’d rented a fenced-in parking lot to stage our show, on West Florissant Avenue, where protesters had been met by police with tear gas night after night. A few hundred yards away from where I was broadcasting, a tense standoff was developing between cops and protesters. As they had numerous times, the two sides stood staring at each other. Demonstrators chanted slogans and hurled occasional verbal invective. Cops in riot gear did their best to appear menacing. And then, as usually happened, someone chucked a plastic bottle filled with water, or maybe a rock, and then, boom! Out came the tear gas.

  If you’ve never been teargassed, let me say it’s a truly vile experience. It feels aggressive. It makes you furious (or I should say, it made me furious). It makes you feel like the cops are there to fight you, and it makes you want to fight them back.

  The gas chased the demonstrators down the block past our live location, and as I continued to broadcast, I could hear a bunch of protesters, mostly young people, running down the block, howling with anger and adrenaline. As I faced into the camera, with my back to them, a few of them saw me under the klieg lights, talking into a microphone along with my colleague Craig Melvin. They started chucking rocks.

  “Hey, hey, hey.” Craig said sternly. He swatted a few away that were headed toward me. “Watch out, Chris.”

  “Tell the true story!” a young woman yelled.

  A young man with his face covered walked up and put his hands on the fence. “It ain’t just about Mike Brown no more. It’s about all people.”

  I’m standing on one side of the fence, and he’s on the other. When we originally scouted the location, we liked the fence in part because it gave us some protection from the police, who the night before had fired a tear gas canister at an Al Jazeera film crew. But now the situation is reversed. Here I am, protected and privileged. And there he is on the other side of the fence. I’m gonna leave Ferguson in a few days, and he’s gonna be here with these same cops who just teargassed him.

  He moved on. Another young man approached the fence. “You see how they do us out here? They treat us like animals.”

  Are we part of the same political entity, he and I?

  Do we live in the same country?

  I’ll never see him again. I’ll never get pulled over by the Ferguson cops for failing to signal. I’ll never be stopped and frisked by the New York City police. Life is pretty damn good in the part of the Nation I live in. It’s quiet and peaceful. It’s prosperous, and it’s orderly.

  So what would it mean if the Nation and the Colony were joined, if the borders erased, and the humanity—the full, outrageous, maddening humanity—of every single human citizen were recognized and embodied in our society? Or even just to start, in our policing?

  I want to think it would be nothing but a net benefit for all. For so long one of the great tools of white supremacy has been to tell whi
te people that there’s a fixed pie, and whatever black people get, they lose. As a matter of first principles, I reject that. But it’s not just faith that leads me to that belief. In fact, I think all available evidence suggests that the immiseration of large swaths of black and brown America has a negative net effect on white people. A country that, for instance, radically reduced incarceration and increased investment in the human potential of millions of black and brown people would be a richer one. And we know from study after study that racial integration improves measurable outcomes for everyone involved. Integrated schools (which we have largely abandoned) produce net benefits for all children, black and white. White people do not need to experience genuine democracy, equality, full citizenship, and recognition for all as a loss or redistribution—eating less so that others may eat more. We can all feast together.

  That’s my belief as a political matter, and it’s what the data show. And yet that’s not the whole story. Colonial territories do confer material benefits on their colonizers. That is the entire point of conquest and occupation. Sometimes those benefits are opaque, and in the case of the Colony and the Nation they can be all but illegible. But in Ferguson they were clear; 12 percent of the municipal revenue was raised through tickets. That money was coming disproportionately from the town’s black citizens, which meant white people were able to pay lower taxes and make up the difference through harassment of people who didn’t look like them.

  It’s not just Ferguson. In rural economies from upstate New York to downstate Illinois and across the land, in places where all the other employers have left, prisons have become a central source of employment and economic stimulus. On the West Texas plains, in the Mississippi Delta, and in the coalfields of southern Appalachia, the endless stream of prisoners sent to them from the Colony provides livelihoods for the locals. Without them, there would be no work.

  Same goes for the $5 billion private prison industry, which is not, in any statistical sense, the cause of the explosion in incarceration but has managed to reap an enormous stream of revenue from it. Once again we see a net transfer of wealth disproportionately from people of color and subjects of the Colony to inhabitants of the Nation who represent the employees, management, and shareholders of these companies.

  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.

  TO BE HONEST, SOME part of me, deep down in my gut, is skeptical that we can radically change policing and justice and society and not have it change my life, too. Some part of me believes, not intellectually but in my skin, that I’m going to have to give something up. Maybe I’ll have to give a lot up. Maybe the size of the pie is fixed. Maybe equality will cost me something. If it’s something material, I don’t mind. I can pay higher taxes, if that’s what it takes. But that’s not what I mean. Maybe true equality would fundamentally alter my way of life, my lived experience of the world in every waking moment.

  I remember the bad old days of New York, and I still feel uneasy in places where there are broken windows and vagrants. Maybe everybody does, or maybe just privileged white people do. 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 police with preserving order rather than with ensuring safety. Order is a slippery thing: it’s in the eyes of the beholder and the judgments of the powerful. Safety is clearer: it’s freedom from violence and intrusion.

  If we abandoned our obsession with order, what would happen? Maybe that stalking unease I felt as a teenager in this city would return. Maybe I’d have to pay a mental tax and reorient my way of thinking, to see sidewalk hustlers and squeegee men not as threats but as part of the social fabric of a community I share. As part of a Nation that is mine but, crucially, not mine alone.

  IMAGINE A BUTTON THAT would deliver you fifty dollars every time you pressed it. The only catch is that when you pressed the button, someone else, somewhere in the world, would be briefly shocked. There’d be no permanent injuries. You’d never see their faces.

  I imagine we’d all agree that it’s morally indefensible to push the button. I mean, sure, you might rationalize that in a global sense, your actual happiness gain of fifty dollars would be larger than the other person’s temporary discomfort of a shock. And if the person sitting by the button is poor and desperate, I doubt we’d judge her if she pushed the button to feed her kids or get money toward much-needed medicine. But overall it’s not okay, as a general principle, to impose random harm on someone else so that you can reap a reward. That’s our moral commitment.

  Now imagine for a moment this was an actual option—not a test of moral commitment but something people could do. How many would do it? Imagine a frenzied crowd watching people one after another push the button and make their fifty dollars, then line up to do it again. Or imagine the button is in a private booth, hidden from prying eyes and social sanction, like the places where we fill out our ballots.

  The temptation to push would be overwhelming. After all, the gain is so tangible and so immediate, so easy to conjure, and the harm so abstract. Someone, somewhere in the world is going to be hurt. Someone you’ll never meet and never know.

  Now imagine the same button, but rather than dispensing money, pushing it gives you an all-encompassing feeling of security, the warm sense of being rooted and safe. And somewhere, someone you don’t know, will experience the opposite, a brief stab of anxiety, the wave of panic and fear.

  Again, we know it’s wrong, but what if this button is on your smartphone, always there lurking? You could press it whenever you needed that feeling, knowing full well someone else would pay the price. It’s tempting to want to feel safe and rooted. It’s tempting to want order and comfort, especially if it is delivered free or the cost is paid out of view. But you would never press that button if it made your kids shriek in panic, or if it sent a friend or loved one into a paralyzing spiral of fear. You wouldn’t press it if you had to see the results.

  The voters who’ve endorsed the Colony’s construction were selecting from a menu of options. And that menu was put together by shrewd politicians who offered up options that they felt would benefit them and/or neatly play to the white fear that is one of the most singularly explosive forces (if not the most explosive force) in American politics.

  Our politics has constructed a series of rationales for us to press the button, telling us it’s okay to want to press it. Press the button. Elect me, and you can press it all you want. Elect me, and you’ll feel safe.

  If we are going to change this, if our subjects are to truly and finally become our fellow citizens, then we have to stop pressing it.

  ON A LOVELY SPRING day about a year ago, as I was beginning to conceive of this book, I was walking alone through Prospect Park. New York City is “diverse,” of course, but it’s also segregated as hell. The density of the city just means that all the lines are more finely drawn. Block by block, building by building, intersecting and overlapping pockets and niches of Nation and Colony fit together like dovetail joints on a finely crafted piece of wooden furniture.

  But Prospect Park is enjoyed by people from both the Colony and the Nation, a borderland between the affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods on the west side (where I live), and the working- and middle-class, predominantly black neighborhoods on the east side.

  It is a piece of urban paradise, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert B. Vaux, who believed it to be their masterpiece, even greater than Central Park. It has trees, brooks, waterfalls, ponds, long lovely lawns, a lagoon, and endless spaces for residents of the city to grill and play catch and bang drums. On a nice day, the park feels like one of the most exuberant places on earth.

  Walking through the park, I s
aw four black boys on bikes laughing loudly, wildly. I recognized their bearing from my own youth. They were on the edge of puberty, surging with testosterone and mischief, away from any adult supervision, goading each other on. They yelled and menaced passersby. One pretended he was going to run over a man pushing a stroller, then swerved around. When the man said something, he stopped and dismounted his bike. “What’d you say?” he said, his chest out.

  The man, there with his infant child, a preschooler, and his wife, shrank away.

  Emboldened, the boys pedaled off, swerving and yelling and drawing increasingly concerned and panicked stares from the people (mostly white) walking past. I kept walking, shaking my head, half remembering my own youthful hijinks and half concerned.

  A few minutes later I saw them again. They were now even more energized, manic in the way only teenage boys can be. They were shouting at passersby, cussing, stopping to flex and menace.

  The one who seemed to be the ringleader then biked up past a white man who was holding his phone, snatched it out of his hands, and biked off. The man yelled and chased after him and was joined by a few others also yelling. “He took that guy’s phone!”

  The boys had crossed over from disorderliness to unlawfulness, I thought to myself. Acting the fool was one thing, but taking someone’s phone was quite another. Who knew what they would get up to next? I reached for my own phone.

  This was the spring of 2015, less than a year since Michael Brown’s death and shortly after the unrest in Baltimore. I’d spent months talking to people about police and policing and harassment. I’d watched video after video of police shooting and killing black men and boys. Oftentimes they had been summoned to the scene only because they answered a 911 call about some disturbance—for instance, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland city park with a pellet gun. I’m sure whoever made that call to the Cleveland police thought they were doing the responsible thing. They thought they were protecting people in that park from harm. But that person pushed a domino that ended that boy’s life.