As I covered the unrest in Ferguson, Alexander’s analysis seemed undeniable. Clearly the police had taken on the role of enforcing an unannounced but very real form of segregation in the St. Louis suburb. Here was a town that was born of white flight and segregation, nestled in a group of similar hamlets that were notoriously “sundown towns,” where southern police made sure black people didn’t tarry or stay the night. And despite the fact that Ferguson’s residents were mostly black, the town’s entire power structure was white, from the mayor, to the city manager, to all but one school board member as well as all but one city council member, and to the police chief and the police force itself, which had three black cops out of fifty-three.
Then just eight months later I was on the streets of Baltimore after yet another young black man died at the hands of police, and the stories and complaints I heard from the residents there sounded uncannily like those I’d heard in Ferguson. But if Ferguson’s unrest was clearly the result of a total lack of black political power, that didn’t seem to be the case, at least not at first look, in Baltimore: the city had black city council members, a black mayor, a very powerful black member of Congress, a black state’s attorney, and a police force that was integrated.
If Ferguson looked like Jim Crow, Baltimore was something else. The old Jim Crow comprised twin systems of oppression: segregation across public and private spheres that kept black people away from social and economic equality, and systematic political disenfranchisement that made sure black citizens weren’t represented democratically. These twin systems required two separate pieces of landmark legislation to destroy, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Through ceaseless struggle and federal oversight, the civil rights movement ended de jure segregation and created the legal conditions for black elected political power—state representatives, black mayors, city council members, black police chiefs, even a few black senators and a black president. But this power has turned out to be strikingly confined and circumscribed, incorporated into the maintenance of order through something that looks—in many places—more like the centuries-old model of colonial administration.
From India to Vietnam to the Caribbean, colonial systems have always integrated the colonized into government power, while still keeping the colonial subjects in their place.
Half the cops accused of killing Freddie Gray were black; half were white. The Baltimore police chief is black, as is the mayor. And Freddie Gray, the figure upon whom this authority was wielded?
Well, to those in the neighborhood, there was never any question what race he would be.
In the era of the First Black President, black political power has never been more fully realized, and yet for so many black people blackness feels just as dangerous as ever. Black people can live and even prosper in the Nation, but they can never be truly citizens. The threat of the Colony’s nightstick always lingers, even for, say, a famous and distinguished Harvard professor of African American studies who suddenly found himself in handcuffs on his own stately porch just because someone thought he was a burglar.
Race defines the boundaries of the Colony and the Nation, but race itself is a porous and shifting concept. Whiteness is nonexistent, yet it confers enormous benefits. Blackness is a conjured fiction, yet it is so real it can kill. In their brilliant 2012 collection of essays, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen and Barbara Fields trace the semantic trick of racial vocabulary, which invents categories for the purpose of oppression while appearing to describe things that already exist out in the world. Over time these categories shift, both as reflections of those in power and as expressions of solidarity and resistance in the face of white supremacy.
Because our racial categories are always shifting, morphing, disappearing, and reappearing, so too are the borders between the Colony and the Nation. In many places, the two territories alternate block by block, in a patchwork of unmarked boundaries and detours that are known only by those who live within them. It’s like the fictional cities of Besz′el and Ul Qoma in China Miéville’s gorgeous speculative fantasy detective novel The City & the City. Though the cities occupy the same patch of land, each city’s residents discipline themselves to unsee the landscape of their neighbor’s city.
The two-block stretch where Michael Brown lived and died in Ferguson, the low-rise apartments home to Section 8 tenants that the mayor told me had been a “problem,” is part of the Colony. The farmers’ market a half-mile away, where the mayor was when Brown was shot, is part of the Nation. The west side of Cleveland where twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed while playing in a park is part of the Colony. The Westside of Baltimore, where Dayvon Love grew up and Freddie Gray died, is part of the Colony. The South Side of Chicago, where Laquan McDonald was shot and killed, is too.
This is the legacy of a post-civil-rights social order that gave up on desegregation as a guiding mission and accepted a country of de facto segregation between “nice neighborhoods” and “rough neighborhoods,” “good schools” and “bad schools,” “inner cities” and “bedroom communities.” None of this came about by accident. It was the result of accumulation of policy, from federal housing guidelines and realtor practices to the decisions of tens of thousands of school boards and town councils and homeowners’ associations essentially drawing boundaries: the Nation on one side, the Colony on the other.