A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes (June 2018)
Hayes's 2017 book frames America’s current legal divide in the context of a country divided into two sections. In The Nation, citizens live freely alongside a police force that protects and serves the community. In The Colony, the police imposes its will on a repressed population under the guise of upholding the law and maintaining order. Another way to summarize Hayes's point is that depending on who you are, the police in this country produce either a sense of safety or a sense of terror.
A strength of A Colony in a Nation is the way it uses simple statistics to emphasize or support Hayes's many observations. I thought the note about black people being four to eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana use despite usage rates being roughly equal among different racial groups was a very convincing way to make a point about how police officers can be influenced by certain biases when making decisions while on the job (1). The note about how police cadets train five to six times more on how to shoot a gun than they do on how to calm situations without using force was also a fascinating note that suggests the way officers are trained does not always best prepare them for the work they will be doing.
The best statistics take advantage of the largest possible sample size and Hayes's book was no different in this way. He suggests that America has a problem with incarceration by pointing out how the USA has 25% of the world’s prisoners despite being only 5% of the global population. Perhaps more shocking is that the discrepancy is so large that releasing every nonviolent drug offender would still keep the USA in the lead for the highly prestigious ‘most prisoners’ honor.
The underlying theme of the book is fear. In 2016, American fear of crime reached an all-time high despite crime reaching an all-time low. The focus these days seems to be on fake news and an obsession regarding what constitutes a fact – this debate distracts us from the more urgent question of what to do when everyone agrees on a fact yet can’t control how their resulting reaction, perception, or opinion manifests as terror. My personal fear is that until we come together to work through our terrors and establish a sense of safety and security through cooperation and mutual understanding, books like A Colony in a Nation will remain reminders of how things will always be rather than the agents of change the country so desperately needs.
One up: I’ve railed in the past here about how certain books lose the power of their message when they focus too much on describing the sweeping societal improvements that would results from… you know… everyone reading the book and changing their lifestyles immediately. I thought this book did well to avoid that problem by focusing on providing clear and obvious explanations for why things have happened.
The biggest obstacle to change is the status quo and the desire to retain the status quo is strongest whenever there is a lack of clear explanations for current conditions. Books that offer explanations help battle against the impulse to prefer the status quo because people are better able to see that a change will not result in an unintended return to old ways.
One down: At various point in A Colony in a Nation, Hayes takes aim at the ‘fixed pie’ illusion – the mentality that anything gained by someone else comes at your own expense. He even goes to the extent of describing it as the driving force behind white supremacy, a thought that although I understood where it was coming from I thought perhaps was a little much for what I suspect is a fairly common worldview.
A better example of the ‘fixed pie’ problem might be the way prisons can become a source of economic activity in certain downtrodden areas. When a prison becomes the primary source of jobs and opportunity for locals, it comes at the expense of those who form the bloated prison populations I referenced earlier in this post.
Just saying: I think we here at TOA are officially against books that invent a word or phrase that is consistently referred to throughout the rest of the book. I understood Hayes's initial comparison of the USA to a two-part Colony/Nation construction – I didn’t need the repeated references in the later chapters to The Colony or The Nation to feel connected to the book’s message.
Footnotes / unseen bias
1. OK, so maybe this isn’t the most sober point…
Of course, when companies hire four to eight times as many white people (rough numerical estimate from TOA) no one seems to write books citing this as proof of a barely-hidden racism in hiring – rather, the writing always takes the tone of ‘how can a company gradually (read: slowly) fix the tiny clerical error that accidentally and unfortunately crept into the hiring process despite the best efforts of the otherwise completely unbiased (and therefore entirely unaccountable) hiring teams?’
