A Colony In A Nation

Despite increased African-American political power, being black seems as dangerous as ever. In an adaptation from his new book, the author examines the system that drives police killings—and its consequences for everyone

- Chris Hayes

What most endures about Richard Nixon’s 1968 speech to the Republican convention is his rhetoric about “law and order”—rhetoric that, half a century later, we’re hearing once again from a new Republican president. But that was not, to my mind, the speech’s most important theme. Nixon understood that black demands for equality—as cities were torn by riots, with ink on civil-rights legislation barely dry—had to be acknowledged and given their rhetorical due. “Let us build bridges, my friends,” Nixon said, “build bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black America from white America. Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.”

A colony in a nation. Nixon meant to conjure an image of a people reduced to mere recipients of state handouts rather than active citizens shaping their own lives. And in using the image of a colony to make his point, he was, in his odd way, channeling the spirit of the time.

As anti-colonial movements erupted in the 1960s, colonized people across the globe recognized a unity of purpose between their struggles for self-determination and the struggle of black Americans. Black activists, in turn, recognized their own circumstances in the images of colonial subjects fighting an oppressive white government. America’s colonial history looked quite different from that of, say, Rhodesia, but on the ground, the structures of oppression seemed remarkably similar.

Nixon was, of course, correct that black Americans “don’t want to be a colony in recipients of state handouts rather than active citizens shaping their own lives. And in using the image of a colony to make his point, he was, in his odd way, channeling the spirit of the time.