Hayes is a forceful and eloquent writer, and this book deserves close attention by a broad readership. He offers a clear and useful framework for understanding the current dysfunctions of American society. It’s a brilliant diagnosis, and the necessary treatments – more spending on social programs, the de-militarization of the police, gradual changes to the conscious attitudes and unconscious biases of millions of Americans – are more urgent than ever.
At first mention the metaphor seems overdrawn, and eventually it slips a bit under its own weight...But among white Americans, ideas about the collective guilt of black Americans exert a powerful pull. In the Colony, individual guilt or innocence is largely irrelevant. Hayes tells story after story of innocent black suspects routinely standing in for the guilty ... Hayes’s forceful analysis comes from an evocative reading of our colonial past ... compel[s] readers to wrestle with some very tough questions about the nature of American democracy and its deep roots in racism, inequality and punishment.
...although [Hayes] illuminates a great deal in this short book, he frustrates as well — mainly because he shows that he is capable of more sustained illumination ... this is the most important notion Hayes touches on in his book: the relentless motor force of white fear ... Hayes, a storyteller with a mass audience and a willingness to admit his own fear, is important now ... Fortunately, with his broadcast platform and his manifest smarts, Hayes can make his book the start of a discussion, not the end of one. A Colony in a Nation reminds us that fear of the other, when weaponized and mechanized by the state, usually makes things worse. That’s a lesson Americans of every color would do well to remember.
With perhaps the first significant theorization on race of the Trump era, Hayes delivers a book as dark and dire as the moment and even more vital than when initially conceived ... Hayes has a particular talent for examining rather unflinchingly our national ills and synthesizing them into grand phenomena that threaten the weakening stability of power in America ... But Hayes digs below the bombast and spectacle so characteristic of the television coverage he and his colleagues are bound to on cable news to examine the penal, fiscal and bureaucratic administration of the Colony.
Writing with clarity, intelligence, and compassion, Hayes deftly illuminates the complex state of affairs that has evolved since the 1960s civil rights protests, and resulted in the current backlash.
...a laser-focused, necessary book about U.S. race relations, primarily the black experience, and law and order as they are experienced across the country ... This is an important, persuasive book that, if read, can help Americans begin to heal the divide between these two nations.
Offering a persuasive analysis, he distinguishes between the Nation, inhabited by the 'affluent, white, elite,' and the Colony, largely urban, poor, 'overwhelmingly black and brown' but increasingly including working-class whites ... A timely and impassioned argument for social justice.
