control, and the underside of government such as prisons, courts, and treasuries. Friedman is considered a pathbreaking scholar producing big ideas that blow the whistle on bad behavior within society, and author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Carceral Apartheid and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons takes us on the journey of the second Great Migration, where generations of Black families have fled white supremacist violence in the U.S. South, hoping to find refuge in California. Yet, upon arrival they continued to experience more racism, which in some cases radicalized the liberatory politics of West Coast Black communities. I write on page 99:Visit Brittany Friedman's website.Black families who had fled the South were left feeling disillusioned. Their hopes and dreams for a better life elsewhere were revealed to be simply unattainable due to the same racialized violence they had endured for generations.Surprisingly, page 99 captures deeply a key takeaway from my book that explains why the Black Freedom Movement holds a significant place in California history. This page also showcases the power of life history interviews and how Carceral Apartheid weaves lived experiences with clear theorizing throughout the book’s storytelling, a writing style often found in creative non-fiction.
Particularly for the younger cohort, joining Black revolutionary struggles in California became a way to fight back against new versions of the same carceral apartheid that their families fled in the Southern states. During the time that I first met Anthony, I also began to connect with several members of Black political organizations who joined in the 1960s.
Through this network I met Avery, a high-ranking leader in the original Black Panther Party who explained to me in an interview this sentiment in the context of Oakland, California:Oakland is probably very much the ideal place because Oakland had been an all White city up until the forties, 1940s, when, during the second Great Migration, Blacks came to Oakland, as they did to Chicago, whatever, from the south…So, Oakland went from being a white city to an almost half Black City, in like one generation. In the south, where you had the main part of the movement; where the majority of Black people had been living, the Whites were so violent and vicious…Now, why is that important?
Because, who joins the Black Panther Party are the people who are living in the North because they are already disconnected from the Klan, so they don’t have that fear; they don’t have that fear of the Klan. But, now they have a consciousness; who is going to let somebody…
Overall, the test works for my book in so much that page 99 displays a key takeaway from Carceral Apartheid. The generation of the 1960s and 1970s that fought for liberation and organized major social movement groups against carceral apartheid were a unique generation in terms of many being the children of Black people fleeing the Ku Klux Klan dominated South, with the promise of a new life. When they instead encountered a similar pattern of alliances between emerging white supremacist groups and the police in California, both in society and within prisons, they fought back every step of the way.
So even though the Page 99 Test only captures a portion of my book’s main argument, it does reveal several of my book’s strengths. Notably, my use of original interviews with people who catalyzed organized resistance to the system of oppression that I term “carceral apartheid,” the system I trace as a violent through-line of colonial and postcolonial governance designed to decimate, destroy, and divide political opposition.
--Marshal Zeringue
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