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 a nation.” And yet that is what he helped bring about. Over the half-century since Nixon delivered those words, we have created precisely that, and not just for black Americans but for brown Amer­icans and others: a colony in a nation. A territory that isn’t actually free. A place controlled from outside rather than from within. A place where the law is a tool of control, rather than a foundation for prosperity. We have created a political regime—and, in its day-to-day applications, a regime of criminal justice—like the one our Founders inherited and rejected, a political order they spilled their blood to defeat.

Another night in Ferguson. By Ed Zurga/EPA/Redux.

American criminal justice isn’t one system with massive racial disparities but two distinct systems. One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land. Policing is a uniquely important and uniquely dangerous function of the state. We know that dictatorships use the police in horrifying ways—we call them “police states” for a reason. But the terrifying truth is that we as a people have created the Colony through democratic means. We have voted to subdue our fellow citizens; we have rushed to the polls to elect people promising to bar others from enjoying the fruits of liberty. A majority of Americans have put a minority under lock and key.

In her masterly chronicle of American mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues convincingly that our current era is defined by its continuity with previous eras of white supremacy and black oppression. Her contention is that as Jim Crow was dismantled as a legal entity in the 1960s it was reconceived and reborn through mass incarceration. Alexander writes, “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind . . . . As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

I covered the unrest in Ferguson, in the aftermath of the shooting by police of Michael Brown, and Alexander’s analysis seemed undeniable. Clearly the police had taken on the role of enforcing an unannounced but very real form of segregation in that St. Louis suburb. Here was a place that was born of white flight and segregation, nestled among a group of similar hamlets that were notoriously “sundown towns,” the kind of place where police made sure black people didn’t tarry or stay the night. And despite the fact that Ferguson’s residents were mostly black, the town’s entire power structure was white, from the mayor to the city manager to all but one school-board member, as well as all but one city-council member. The police chief was white, and the police force had three black cops out of a total of 53 officers.