by which differentiated rights and degrees of citizenship are discursively produced in and through space, with a focus on US cities.
Rios applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Jodi Rios's website.The fragmented geography and postage-stamp size of many cities in North County often meant that residents experience what Patrice has described—amassing several violations from multiple cities, often on the same day for the same infraction, such as having a broken taillight or faulty muffler. Residents comment on the fact you can get pulled over in one jurisdiction and cross over into another ‘and in five seconds get the EXACT same ticket as you just did.’ Another stated, ‘In the county you can get ticketed almost every other day. I have tickets from municipalities I didn’t even know existed. Turns out, I was driving through five different towns when I thought it was all one—because they are literally the size of a football field.’ Yet another said, ‘I’ve been stopped three times in one week in three different municipalities on my way home from work because my windows were tinted. It is ridiculous. The only way you know you’re entering a different city is a different police officer stops you.’.... Residents throughout North County point to tickets that do not list court dates, or list the wrong court date, as intentional attempts at creating confusion about how to settle tickets or ploys to prevent citizens from appearing for court dates and thus to accumulate more fines or warrants for their arrest. Many also explain the difficulties they have encountered when trying to obtain information from part-time courts, which lack full-time staff, hold court only one or two nights each month, and often do not maintain websites.... As a result, the number of people who live with anxiety and fear over warrants for their arrest or mounting fines for small infractions in multiple cities is staggering. This dramatically affects decisions residents make, such as when and where to drive and whether or not to use public space and amenities, such as parks.Page 99 of Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis provides good insight into what this book is about and why I wrote it. First, it includes quotes from residents living in this geography. Ethnography, interviews, and the inclusion of residents’ voices are integral to both the research used and the stories told throughout this book. Stories like those found on page 99, which I heard over and over from residents when working in this area twenty years ago (in a different capacity), led to my original and somewhat unorthodox research question: “What the hell is going on in North St. Louis County and why is nobody doing anything about it?”
Second, the quotes that appear on page 99, although far from the worst, point to the extreme physical and political fragmentation of this area that is fundamental to the history and current experience of everyday life in the racialized suburbs of St. Louis County. These quotes additionally reveal a few of the specific experiences of policing overseen by elected officials and carried out by police officers, property inspectors, and the courts, all of which disproportionately impact poor Black residents. The chapter in which page 99 sits, “Racial States and Local Governance,” indeed lays out the unfathomable degree of everyday policing that depends on the conflation of blackness with risk in tiny historically white municipalities that are now majority Black. Blackness-as-risk not only creates the conditions for extreme forms of ‘policing for revenue’ to be deemed necessary, since tax-generating businesses and higher property values followed white residents to outlying suburbs, but it is also the reason these practices go seemingly unnoticed by the rest of the region.
Readers who know that the city of Ferguson sits in suburban St. Louis and are familiar with the details of Michael Brown’s death in 2014 may make the connection between policing practices described on page 99 and why Brown was initially stopped by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. This connection however is a stretch. Furthermore, page 99 does not allude to the radical practices of freedom that emerged from this area, although fragmentation and current policing practices are critical to understanding Ferguson resistance that, I argue, launched the Black Lives Matter movement as we know it. Part 2 of Black Lives and Spatial Matters, “Blackness as Freedom,” is therefore lost in the reading of page 99.
--Marshal Zeringue
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