A Colony in a Nation

About this book

America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a post-racial world, but nearly every empirical measure--wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation--reveals that racial inequality hasn't improved since 1968. With the clarity and originality that distinguished his prescient bestseller Twilight of the Elites("a stunning polemic," said Ta-Nehisi Coates), award-winning journalist Chris Hayes offers a powerful new framework in which to understand our current crisis. Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order; fear trumps civil rights; and aggressive policing resembles occupation. How and why did Americans build a system where conditions in Ferguson and West Baltimore mirror those that sparked the American Revolution? Blending wide-ranging historical research with political, social, and economic analysis, A Colony in a Nationexplains how a Nation founded on justice constructed the Colony--and how it threatens our democracy.