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Analysis Of A Colony In A Nation By Chris Hayes

1262 Words6 Pages

This paper explores Chris Hayes’ book, “A Colony in a Nation” (2017), a piece of literary work that attempts to analyze and explore the complex relationship between what Hayes refers to as two separate Americas: the Colony and the Nation. Chris Hayes is a liberal political commentator, journalist, author, and host of ‘All In with Chris Hayes,’ a weekday news an opinion show on MSNBC. By looking at the issue from a historical, social, and political perspective, he attempts to explain how the American justice system came to be what it is today. By using examples of racial conflict, incorporated with his own experiences with policing and the court system, Hayes shows how fear, especially fear of ‘the Other’ causes a multitude of problems at the societal level, a concept I have studied in the past. Most importantly, based off of various statistics and research, he makes the argument that inequality in America hasn’t improved as much as people would like to think it has since the 1960s. A Summary & Analysis of “A Colony in a Nation” In the beginning of the book, Hayes states, “There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when …show more content…

It is also the most incarcerated.” (Hayes, 2017, p. 7) He then backs it up with reputable and eye-opening statistics, such as the fact that nearly one out of every four prisoners in the world is an American, even though the U.S. contains only about five percent of the world’s population. According to Hayes, some have argued the total number of Americans under penal supervision rivals the number of Russians in the gulag(s) under Stalin. Chris continues to expose the disparities of punishment and violence between affluent, predominantly white communities and poor, predominantly black neighborhoods, using the cities of Baltimore and Chicago as the basis for his

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