In the Colony, violence looms, and failure to comply can be fatal. Sandra Bland, a twenty-eight-year-old black woman who died in a Texas prison cell in July 2015, was pulled over because she didn’t signal a lane change. Walter Scott, the fifty-year-old black man shot in the back three months earlier as he fled a North Charleston police officer, was pulled over because one of the three brake lights on his newly purchased car was out. Freddie Gray, the twenty-five-year-old resident of one of Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods whose spinal cord was snapped in a police van, simply made eye contact with a police officer and started to move swiftly in the other direction.
If you live in the Nation, the criminal justice system functions like your laptop’s operating system, quietly humming in the background, doing what it needs to do to allow you to be your most efficient, functional self. In the Colony, the system functions like a computer virus: it intrudes constantly, it interrupts your life at the most inconvenient times, and it does this as a matter of course. The disruption itself is normal.
In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order. 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. Police officers tasked with keeping these two realms separate intuitively grasp of the contours of this divide: as one Baltimore police sergeant instructed his officers, “Do not treat criminals like citizens.”
In the Nation, you can stroll down the middle of a quiet, carless street with no hassle, as I did with James Knowles, the white Republican mayor of Ferguson. We chatted on a leafy block in a predominantly white neighborhood filled with stately Victorian homes and wraparound porches. There were no cops around. We were technically breaking the law—you can’t walk in the middle of the street—but no one was going to enforce that law, because really what’s the point. Who were we hurting?
In the Colony, just half a mile away, the disorderly act of strolling down the middle of the street could be the first link in the chain of events that ends your life at the hands of the state.
The Colony is overwhelmingly black and brown, but in the wake of financial catastrophe, deindustrialization, and sustained wage stagnation, the tendencies and systems of control developed in the Colony have been deployed over wider and wider swaths of working-class white America. If you released every African American and Latino prisoner in America’s prisons, the United States would still be one of the most incarcerated societies on earth. And the makeup of those white prisoners is dramatically skewed toward the poor and uneducated. As of 2008, nearly 15 percent of white high school dropouts aged 20 to 34 were in prison. For white college grads, the rate was under 1 percent.
Maintaining the division between the Colony and the Nation is treacherous precisely because the constant threat that the tools honed in the Colony will be wielded in the Nation; that tyranny and violence tolerated at the periphery will ultimately infiltrate the core. American police shoot an alarmingly high and disproportionate number of black people. But they also shoot a shockingly large number of white people.
Even the most sympathetic residents of the Nation, I think, find it easy to think this is all someone else’s problem. Yes, of course, America is overincarcerated, of course the police killing unarmed black men is awful, and yes, of course I’d like to see all that change. But it’s fundamentally someone else’s issue.
It’s not.
Here’s why.
* As sociologist Max Weber argued in Politics as a Vocation (1919), the state is the one institution that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
II
The images in the video are blurry and dark—a scene that has the jagged uneasiness of something you shouldn’t be seeing. Voices on the edge of panic and brimming with rage discuss the uniformed men who are marching into view. In the smartphone’s shaky frame, you can start to make out the invaders in silhouette against a vehicle’s flashing lights. Lots of shouts now from the onlookers who are seeing the same image coming into view. The marching men are dressed in black, and as they come closer, you can see they are wearing armor. Bulges at the knees. Shields in hand. They stroll casually. The street is empty, but the bystanders, standing in their yard sipping from plastic cups, begin chanting at them: “You go home! You go home! You go home!”
One of the bystanders narrates the unfolding scene into the phone. “They are marching toward us. You can see ’em coming, and they are marching toward us.” At this point the viewer sees many more men in armor than had first appeared. Maybe three dozen in a walking wedge formation are making their way up the street. They are not in a hurry. Those congregated in the yard chant “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” The camera pans to the yard as four young men, one holding a drink, reach up in to the air, chanting “Hands up!” in unison.
A few nights earlier in this neighborhood a police officer named Darren Wilson had shot and killed a young man named Michael Brown. Brown was unarmed. The friend who was with him, and several other eyewitnesses, said he had had his hands up* when he was shot. In the following days, protests erupted, a gas station was burned, police came out in shockingly heavy force, and those who took to the streets united around the chant “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
The young men in the yard are now hit by the high beams of a police vehicle. Through the loudspeaker, it sounds as if the cops tell them to “go home,” and they respond “We in our yard!” pointing to the ground beneath their feet for emphasis. The men in the yard raise their hands defiantly, as the loudspeaker instructs them “Please return inside,” with the same oddly laconic pacing of the armed men marching toward them. The residents stand defiantly with hands up, as someone off camera angrily calls the police’s bluff: “Go head, shoot that motherfucker. Shoot that motherfucker!”
Another says, “C’mon. You want it. Come get it. You want it. Come get it.”
His friend yells, “This my property!” and points again down at the ground as the camera pans to reveal the police have now come within about twenty feet.
And then: a brief flare, and the screen goes dark.