Lowe, Dan

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A review of Chris Hayes's book on race and policing in the United States, A Colony In A Nation (2017)

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rers20Ethnic and Racial StudiesISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20A Colony in a NationDan LoweTo cite this article: Dan Lowe (2018) A Colony in a Nation, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41:8,1513-1515, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1380215To link to this article:  https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1380215Published online: 25 Sep 2017.Submit your article to this journal Article views: 76View Crossmark dataespecially Muslims, creating an intense desire for securitization that closesborders, and creates strong-sounding leaders like Donald Trump and Theresa May.Part of this malaise is a heightened individualization, in which the “uncertain-ties of human existence are privatized” (59) and which Bauman has written aboutelsewhere; manifested in a contemporary “society of performance”which replacesFoucault’s disciplinary society. Shaped by the logics of markets, this can only gen-erate failure and depression. Here speaks a man who has spent his professional lifein universities in which students and academics alike are turned into a series ofmetrics that measure and compare performances.Bauman’s dystopian portrait of what amount to the lethal dynamics of globa-lization is not without redress. He argues from the position of a humanism thatembraces the stranger, and which steps back from the abyss of insecurity andindividualism to more collective social arrangements: “collective wellbeing” inwhich we live in “mutual peace, solidarity and cooperation, amidst strangers” asopposed to the alternative, the possibility of “collective extinction” (72). Kant’sappeal to hospitality and his concept of morality are important in guidingBauman’s thoughts here, as elsewhere in the book, where Kant supplies the phi-losophical architecture of the alternative to the circumstances Bauman so lucidlycriticizes.This is a dark book, written at the end of a long and intellectually productivelife. It paints a disturbing and recognizable sociological portrait of what Baumancalls the “existential insecurity” through which we are living; one of his last contri-butions to the analysis of UK society by one of its major sociologists. And in thespirit of a progressive humanism, he points us in kinder and less brutal directions.Let’s hope he is right.Caroline KnowlesDepartment of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of Londonc.knowles@gold.ac.uk© 2018 Caroline Knowleshttps://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1401732A Colony in a Nation, by Chris Hayes, New York, W.W. Norton & Company,2017, 256 pp., $26.95 (hardback), ISBN 9780393254228The mounting number of deaths of unarmed black men and women at the handsof police has made a tense debate about race and policing in the United Statesunavoidable. With some notable exceptions, academics have been slow to jointhis debate. This is not a criticism; to be done well, scholarship must move at adifferent pace from the 24-hour news cycle. But in the meantime, scholars whowish to think about these deaths and the issue of race and policing must lookto other sources of analysis.Chris Hayes is a journalist, but his recent volume contains much of interest forscholars concerned with racial justice. The conventional way of characterizing theETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1513problem of race and policing in the United States is that our criminal justice systeminvolvesdisturbing racial disparities. But this characterization, Hayes argues, obscuresthe deeper reality of how criminal justice operates in this country. Hayes’ thesis is that‘American criminal justice isn’t one systemwithmassive racial disparities but two dis-tinct regimes. One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democ-racy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land’ (32). Thedeaths noted above are aberrations only in the Nation; in the Colony, they are theresult of the second criminal justice system functioning normally.Hayes initially develops this framework through a discussion of Ferguson, Mis-souri – the town which erupted in protest after the death of Michael Brown. Whenprotestors clashed with police, the world saw law enforcement bristling with mili-tary-grade equipment. As Hayes notes, this militarized overreaction is character-istic of colonial control. The illegitimacy of the colonial ruler requires more forcethan the traditional instruments of order, and the occupier feels the distinctivefear of those who must govern a community of which they are not a part.The contrast between the Colony and Nation is most striking in Hayes’ discus-sion of elite college campuses. There are places where illegal drugs are used fre-quently; sporting events regularly involve widespread drunken, disorderly revelry;and where acting out is romanticized as youthful hijinks. Many of these crimes areviolent, as the epidemic of sexual assault on campus shows. And yet, there is noimpulse toward implementing stop and frisk there. Indeed, any such proposalwould face immediate rebellion from the rich, white parents of students. Wherewe tolerate over-enforcement determines who gets to live in the Nation andwho must live in the Colony.Hayes’mostunexpected insights come fromthecomparisonof Fergusonnotwiththe usual examples discussed in postcolonial theory but with the British colonies ontheeveof theAmericanRevolution. The financial exploitationof the colonies parallelsthe fees and fines usedby theprimarilywhite city government to extractwealth fromthe black population. (Hayes includes the astonishing fact that the year MichaelBrown was killed, police filed 53,000 traffic violations in Ferguson – a city of only22,000 people.) Here, Hayes is at his best, interweaving history and contemporaryevents to illuminate these tragic deaths. It is not accidental, on Hayes’ account,that many of the victims of police brutality interacted with the police only becauseof some minor infraction – Eric Garner selling loose cigarettes; Michael Brownwalking in the middle of the street; Sandra Bland failing to signal a lane change.The over-policing of minor infractions is in fact characteristic of colonial control.Despite these merits, scholars will find real deficiencies here. Hayes offers onlya cursory engagement with the literature on mass incarceration and BrokenWindows policing, too speculative to be persuasive and too meandering to beinformative. Others will find his lack of familiarity with postcolonial thought aggra-vating. And although Hayes’ prose is always readable – and sometimes excep-tional – many will not enjoy his unsystematic, occasionally meditative style.At times, these meditations leave obvious gaps. The maddening inconsistencyHayes identifies in how we treat poor, black neighbourhoods and college campusesneglects the ideology which masks the inconsistency. The story, all too easy torecite, is that (white) college students are becoming productive, responsible1514 BOOK REVIEWSmembers of society, but poor urban blacks are not. Thus, reactionaries respond toevery new police shooting with the same question: “Why aren’t we talking aboutblack on black crime?” This would be a baffling non sequitur were it not presumingthis ideology; namely, that which we normally talk about as rights – rights againstpolice harassment, against unreasonable search and seizure, and ultimately againstbeing killed – are not really rights at all, but privileges, which some groupsmight failto earn. And the judgement about which groups are deserving and which are not isinformed by the group’s race. Hence, as Hayes himself notes, the opioid epidemicamong whites has not spurred calls for a tough-on-crime crackdown, but compas-sionate reconsideration of addiction as a disease. This ideology of racialized deserv-ingness isn’t developed in Hayes’ book, but it does as much as anything to maintainthe boundary between Colony and Nation.Nevertheless, this conceptual framework has great value. White Americans oftenreact to each police shooting with confused defensiveness. Their experiences withthe police are not consistent with how Black Lives Matter activists describe policebehaviour. Hayes’ volume can help them see what is so crucial, that the whiteexperience of crime and policing is usually only an experience of the Nation –and so a poor reflection of how things go in the Colony. As Hayes notes, “forwhite Americans, lethal violence is nearly as rare as it is in Finland; for black Amer-icans, it’s nearly as common as it is in Mexico. So to talk about the American experi-ence of crime and punishment is to miss the point” (24, emphasis added). If readerscome away from this volume with a framework for understanding nothing morethan this, the time reading it will have been worthwhile.Dan LoweDepartment of Philosophy, University of Coloradodaniel.p.lowe@gmail.comhttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-8841-0236© 2017 Dan Lowehttps://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1380215Trying to get over: African American directors after Blaxploitation,1977-1986, by Keith Corson, Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 2016, ix+275, US$27.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4773-0908-7Trying to get over by Keith Corson makes a significant contribution to the history offilm studies in the United States by filling in the void after the Blaxploitation erathat began in the early to mid-late 70s. The central thesis is the phenomenaldecline in Blaxploitation films (where Blaxploitation films produced in this erawere at a peak in 1974 (forty-two films) to a drastic decline in 1980 (one film)).Blaxploitation films stem from the shift in structural racism in the white dominatedculture of Hollywood to racialized financial interest to capitalize on profits fromthe rise of a Black Culture Industry during the miserable decline of the CivilETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1515

A Colony In A Nation

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A Colony In A Nation

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