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 white 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.