A New York Times bestseller, A Colony in a Nation ignited a national conversation.
America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure--wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation--reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first "law and order" president.
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. A Colony in a Nation explains how a country founded on justice now looks like something uncomfortably close to a police state. How and why did Americans build a system where conditions in Ferguson and West Baltimore mirror those that sparked the American Revolution?
In this "brilliant diagnosis" of our country's ailing criminal justice system (Christian Science Monitor), award-winning journalist Chris Hayes condemns the corrupting influence of fear on our democracy-- and provides a bold and original framework for understanding race, civil rights, and law enforcement in America that will endure for years to come.
