A Colony in a Nation

This felt like an extended text-version of a John Oliver segment (in a good way). A very quick read, but probably more informative if you haven't taken any (decent) courses on recent US history from the 1950s-1990s. Hayes makes interesting and valid connections between the nation-colony relationship of the Revolutionary era and the state of existing-while-black in today's America. He establishes this in the beginning and then sets out to explore the ways it plays out when policing and policy are grounded in white fear. I think this is a good starter book for diving into the ideas Hayes weaves together (redlining, broken windows policing, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, gentrification, etc.) but if you just want a basic understanding of the stakes in the fight for black rights and the premise of the Black Lives Matter movement, I recommend this book.