His first book, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (2016), tells the story of how the Founders created the federal government after the American Revolution.
Rao applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, White Power: Policing American Slavery, and reported the following:
Page 99 takes us to the heart of chapter 5, "Nat Turner's America," with a brief discussion of Turner's religious motivation for attacking the enslavers in Southampton Country, Virginia; before then moving into a paragraph describing his planning, escape, and attack. The final paragraph on page 99 then addresses the enslavers response: to deputize whiteness by exhorting white men to take up arms, either via the militia or on their own.Visit Gautham Rao's website.
With the description of enslaved rebellion and white deputization and policing, there's no page that better captures the essence of this book. The book builds an argument about how enslaved people's resistance and rebellion pushed white enslavers to create a policing system built around white vigilance, deputization and government institutions. On page 99 we see a transformative moment and each of the key elements in the story.
Who has the right to violence? The book takes us back to a world where whiteness was like an officer's badge, and in which the white population gave itself extraordinary policing powers over enslaved and free Black Americans. Enslavers were chiefly worried about rebellions, or what they called insurrections, that would lead to racial apocalypse. Over several centuries, they acted on their fears to build a sprawling police state consisting of empowered white vigilance and government forces like slave patrols and militias. The system survived the Civil War and Reconstruction, and only slowly gave way to the new racism of modernized policing by the end of the 19th century.
--Marshal Zeringue