A Colony in a Nation

"An essential and groundbreaking text in the effort to understand how American criminal justice went so badly awry." —Ta-Nehisi CoatesA 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.