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Law 'n' order
Feb. 19th, 2019 09:11 pmIt's probably bad Black History Month praxis to decide to read a book on police brutality written by a white dude in February when I have a stack of actual Black history books by actual Black people sitting on my shelf, but I decided to read Chris Hayes' A Colony in a Nation anyway, for a few reasons. One, I really, really liked Twilight of the Elites, and two, at around 200 pages (and in size 14 type), it's significantly shorter than, say, Stamped From the Beginning.
While this did not blow my mind as much as Twilight of the Elites, it is still very good -- quite readable, covers a lot of ground, includes a lot of juicy American history that you don't always hear so much about in other places. Hayes spends a good chunk of the book discussing law and taxation enforcement norms in the leadup to the Revolutionary War, and why we have the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments that have been so completely gutted -- for certain people, anyway. He's also quite candid about his own privilege and his process of learning from others in a way that can be a bit inherently awkward simply due to the subject matter but which overall accomplishes its purpose, which is to bolster his argument that there are functionally two separate and parallel criminal justice systems operating in America.
I bought this book when I went to see Hayes do a panel discussion with James Forman Jr., author of the Pulitzer Prize winner Locking Up Our Own, about crime -- both actual crime as a real thing, and crime as tool of political rhetoric. Some of that stuff is covered in this book too, with an emphasis on the mid-crime-wave New York City that Hayes grew up in and its contrast to its current gentrified state.
A Colony in a Nation's extremely journalistic style also means it's got a great bibliography for something so brief. I have only read five of the works on it, so I guess I've got more reading to do.
While this did not blow my mind as much as Twilight of the Elites, it is still very good -- quite readable, covers a lot of ground, includes a lot of juicy American history that you don't always hear so much about in other places. Hayes spends a good chunk of the book discussing law and taxation enforcement norms in the leadup to the Revolutionary War, and why we have the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments that have been so completely gutted -- for certain people, anyway. He's also quite candid about his own privilege and his process of learning from others in a way that can be a bit inherently awkward simply due to the subject matter but which overall accomplishes its purpose, which is to bolster his argument that there are functionally two separate and parallel criminal justice systems operating in America.
I bought this book when I went to see Hayes do a panel discussion with James Forman Jr., author of the Pulitzer Prize winner Locking Up Our Own, about crime -- both actual crime as a real thing, and crime as tool of political rhetoric. Some of that stuff is covered in this book too, with an emphasis on the mid-crime-wave New York City that Hayes grew up in and its contrast to its current gentrified state.
A Colony in a Nation's extremely journalistic style also means it's got a great bibliography for something so brief. I have only read five of the works on it, so I guess I've got more reading to do.