Chris Hayes’ new book “A Colony in a Nation,” was largely inspired by what the MSNBC journalist experienced in Ferguson when he reported on Michael Brown Jr.’s police killing and the movement it propelled. It’s his response to Ferguson and a protest of the ways in which counties and cities police African Americans and occupy black neighborhoods.
“A Colony in a Nation” is a phrase Hayes borrows from a 1968 convention speech given by then-candidate Richard Nixon. In an effort to broaden his appeal to African Americans while inveighing against government programs, Nixon urged, “They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.” Hayes uses the term as a concept for delineating contemporary American life in the nation, which is predominantly white, from the colony, which is primarily black and brown.
“In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order,” Hayes writes. “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.”
The injustice of being “born guilty” is one of the most poignant insights of Hayes’ book. As a white American man who experienced racial hostility as a child, he recognizes that “childhood innocence” has a shorter lifespan for African Americans. Mistakes, minor infractions and rowdy behavior that can be brushed off when you’re a white teenager – as partying after a game or acting out as a college student – continue to have different ramifications and sometimes deadly consequences for African-American youth.
Hayes is concerned with two distinct impulses: the American impulse to punish, and white fear that supports politicians and the criminal justice system in maintaining the occupation of the Colony. (There is no comparable analyses of gender, sexuality, or gender identification; and Hayes lays his cards out as a “straight white man” in a way that some might take issue with, particularly when he writes about campus rape.)
“A Colony in a Nation” portrays white people as almost a monolithic group in terms of their intransigent fear of the colony, and how this fear informs their political behavior. Scientific assertions are made: “White fear is both social fact and something burned into our individual neural pathway.”
Sure sounds a lot like racism to me, but I appreciate the specificity of Hayes’ term. It doesn’t allow for the slippage and the inversion that some white people like to attempt when they speak of “reverse racism,” something divorced from political and economic realities, as if it could be. “Black fear” as an inversion of “white fear” is laughable, though “black pain” might have a little more cachet.
The focus of Hayes’ project is prudent, because a study of Black America as an occupied state isn’t exactly a novel idea – it’s pretty much imperialism and decolonization 101. The most cursory look at black nationalist literature and the literature on the “colonized mind” by black intellectual giants, such as W.E.B DuBois, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon and Stokely Carmichael (all of whom Hayes astutely references), will familiarize one with this well-trodden subject.
Hayes also mentions the contribution of Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book “The New Jim Crow,” which discusses the mass incarceration of black people in recent times. She writes, “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
“A Colony in a Nation” shines a light on the thoughts and minds of white people in the Trump era and shows how collective white fear and America’s long-time obsession with punishment impact the ballot box. Hayes dreams of something better: white people leaning on humanism, reckoning with their fears, and making some sacrifices in helping unravel the great divide between the colony and nation. Such a movement could even reverse the growth of for-profit prisons and detention centers, which prey on the communities they promise to employ. It’s certainly worth the effort.
