Revolts happened often enough that southern planters didn’t have to simply imagine what would happen if the scales were to suddenly tip. In 1770 the Virginia Gazette carried an account of a slave revolt in Bowler Cocke’s Hanover County plantation, indicating the cause: “The Negroes belonging to the plantation having long been treated with too much lenity and indulgence, were grown extremely insolent and unruly.” Ultimately a group of about a dozen white men (and two children bearing weapons) confronted the forty or fifty slaves armed with nothing but farm tools:
The slaves, deaf to all they said, rushed upon them with desperate fury, armed with clubs and staves; one of them knocked down a White man, and was going to repeat the blow to finish him, which one of the boys seeing, levelled his piece, discharged its contents into the fellow’s breast, and brought him to the dust. Another fellow, having also knocked down another of the Whites, was, in the same manner, shot by the other boy. In short, the battle continued sometime desperate, but another of the Negroes having his head almost cut off with a broad sword, and five of them being wounded, the rest fled.
Fear, of course, is not all that motivates the settler, the colonizer, the slaveowner. Another inducement, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, is “plunder.” But the existence of plunder as a motivation, even as the primary one, does not negate the subjective experience of white fear, the terror that individual white people experience and that white writers, preachers, and politicians cultivate socially and politically. That dispatch in the Virginia Gazette was meant to terrify those who read it, and I’m certain it succeeded.
It may seem downright perverse to linger on this kind of fear, the fear felt by enslavers and white colonists. If we point to the fear that motivates a lynch mob, then what are we saying about the moral status of the murder they all committed? Does their fear justify it? The obvious answer is no. The slaves had infinitely more to fear than the slaveowners, and the Indians had infinitely more to fear than the settlers. Even to diagnose and investigate white fear in this period seems an injustice: the fear that should matter to us is the fear of the man who has been murdered, the fear felt by his family and kin and friends and the millions of African Americans across the South who lived through decades of systematic terrorism with essentially no protection from the state. When we think of fear and the lynch mob, we should of course think of the victim, not of the crowd.
But for the Pilgrim in the land of the pagans, the homesteader scratching out a bare existence for a terrified family just a day’s ride from Comanches, the planter patriarch whose family sleeps outnumbered every night, fear is not some excuse for savagery, cruelty, and sadism but is fundamentally inseparable from it. Hurt people hurt people, as the old saying goes. And the truly terrified commit atrocities.
Ultimately the gun is the backstop that prevents the entire social order from being upended. Had it not been for the superior firepower of fearful whites, who knows what would have transpired in American history? You can understand why, in such a situation, certain kinds of white southerners would cling to their guns.
Today Americans still rely on the gun, the power to kill or injure, to preserve the social order in the most fraught and dire moments. Police know their weapon is by their side if the situation they encounter spins too far out of control and they find themselves threatened.
OF COURSE, THE OVERWHELMING majority of police interactions never go near this danger zone. A huge number of calls that come into 911 are complaints not of violent threats but about simple disorder: unruly people on the street, loud music coming from apartment parties, interpersonal conflict teetering on the edge of violence, like the argument that started this book. While law enforcement likes to urge vigilance—if you see something, say something—sometimes, particularly in rapidly gentrifying areas, this ends up being something of a constant headache for police. “So I’m working last week and get dispatched to a call of ‘Suspicious Activity,’ ” reads a post on Reddit’s police message board ProtectAndServe.
Ya’ll wanna know what the suspicious activity was? Someone walking around in the dark with a flashlight and crow bar? Nope. Someone walking into a bank with a full face mask on? Nope. It was two black males who were jump starting a car at 930 in the morning. That was it. Nothing else. Someone called it in.
In the course of the last few years, I’ve had dozens and dozens of conversations with cops, but I’m always struck that for all the training and procedures that accompany being a member of a police force, each police officer has a shocking amount of latitude in any given situation. When I read the above Reddit post, I feel relief that the cop who answered the call to find two guys jumping their car had the good sense not to harass them. But who knows what another cop would’ve done?
At the street level, that autonomy is both an essential part of policing and the source of what so many people in the Colony find so maddening and humiliating. From the cops’ perspective, anything can happen in any interaction—they need the latitude to manage and control whatever they encounter. But for two young black men trying to jump-start a car, no doubt frustrated and late for work, the arrival of a police officer is the arrival of a government agent who may be in a beneficent mood or in a vengeful one. In the moment of his appearance, they go from sovereign to second-class citizens.
To better understand how cops learn to wield this authority, I traveled to New Jersey, to spend a morning in the Morris County Sheriff’s Office. I wanted to experience firsthand how recruits are trained to navigate the irreducible uncertainty of being out on the street in the office’s state-of-the-art virtual reality simulator.