He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas, and reported the following:
Page 99 includes one of the more provocative questions explored in The Transition, captured by James Baldwin as “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” The page describes the critique of integration as a strategy for racial justice and the alternative call from several Black leaders for “liberation schools” that would serve and be controlled by Black communities. It includes the following paragraph summarizing a discussion about the more effective strategy for using schools to further Black empowerment:Follow Daniel Kiel on Twitter.While Dr. King continued to imagine a world in which “every vestige of segregation and inferior education becomes a thing of the past and Negroes and whites study side by side in the socially healing context of the classroom,” Malcolm X was articulating Black-controlled institutions as an alternative. Rather than integrating into White institutions with norms, structures, and curricula that perpetuated an inferiority complex in Black students, Malcolm X Called for “an all-Black school, that we can control; staff it ourselves with the type of teachers that have our good at heart, with the type of books that have in them many of the missing ingredients that have produced this inferiority complex.”Readers turning to page 99 would be introduced to a core distinction in approach between The Transition’s main characters, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, but would not meet either jurist on this page. So, in terms of ideas, the Page 99 Test strikes right to the heart of the foundational difference between the political and judicial philosophies of Marshall and Thomas, but the test fails to alert readers to the book’s protagonists or its central forum, the Supreme Court. While the ideas of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are certainly relevant, neither leader features prominently in the book. The Page 99 Test is thus a mixed bag for The Transition.
Over the past 75 years, no transition from one justice to another on the Supreme Court has entailed as wide an ideological gap as the 1991 transition from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas. The Transition explores what led these two justices to such different perspectives on a wide range of questions about American government and citizenship even though they each claim racial equality and full citizenship for African Americans as a goal. How did the sting of race-based exclusion lead Marshall to demand integration and define his belief that government must solve the inequities it had created? Likewise, what led Thomas, who had experienced integrated schooling, to insist on freedom from government on the path to self-empowerment? The Transition seeks to understand these jurists more deeply to reveal currents that continue to define the meaning of citizenship.
--Marshal Zeringue
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