Elizabeth Cross's "Company Politics"

Elizabeth Cross is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Company Politics: Commerce, Scandal, and French Visions of Indian Empire in the Revolutionary Era, and reported the following:

Exploring corporate intrigue, financial scandals, and imperial competition in an age of revolutionary upheaval, Company Politics is a history of the last French East India Company (Compagnie des Indes) in the period between the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolution. By focusing on a non-state, corporate actor, the book delves into France’s informal, commercial empire in South Asia and argues that the strategies, ideas, and innovations of French economic actors represent key contributions to the histories of capitalism and the modern corporation itself.

Page 99 comes at a transitional moment right in the middle of Chapter 4, which focuses on the history of the Company’s operations in India in the 1780s. The chapter is composed of three case studies on the Company’s three principal trading sites: Pondicherry (Coromandel Coast), Chandernagor (Bengal), and Mahé (Malabar Coast). Page 99 marks the transition between the latter two. As a result, it does not give a great sense of many of the book’s overall themes, but it does highlight one of its key contributions, in that it asks readers to expand their own geographical understandings of the French colonial empire to include places over which France did not have formal territorial dominion. The British East India Company claimed control over Bengal in this era, which meant that the French Company’s trade there was effectively illegal. Similarly, on the Malabar Coast, the French Company was relentlessly challenged by Tipu Sultan of Mysore, who sought to manipulate the company’s access to goods and markets in the name of negotiating a formal military alliance with the French crown against the British.

Accordingly, page 99 reveals one key aspect of this book, in that the book is a story about a French empire that French imperial actors did not – and could not – easily control. It reminds us that despite its extravagant claims of supremacy, imperial power could often be not only exceedingly fragile, but subject to both colonial rivalries and local resistance.

Follow Elizabeth Cross on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Laver's "The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan"

Michael Laver is Professor in the Department of History at Rochester Institute of Technology.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his most recent book, The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan: Gift Giving and Diplomacy, and reported the following:

From page 99:

On May 10, 1657, the Dutch invited a number of Japanese guests to the island of Deshima to partake of a feast. The chief merchant records that he served his distinguished guests “a well-prepared, young, fat billy-goat,” but that the Japanese didn’t seem to like it, preferring instead “bean soup and lean greens.” Here the matter may have rested but, as we have seen in other chapters, although the Japanese always responded to being entertained with a small token of appreciation soon after, on this occasion, only one of the ten guests sent a word of thanks to Deshima, and that was the young son of one of the interpreters. The chief merchant likened the other nine guests to the nine lepers whom Jesus healed in the Gospels but who couldn’t be bothered to come back and thank Jesus for his efforts on their behalf (although likening the chief merchant to Jesus doesn’t seem really in keeping with Dutch Reformed piety!). Be that as it may, the chief merchant goes on to write that this is against all good manners and custom, and speculates that perhaps it’s because the Japanese didn’t like the goat: “If this is true, I think these fussy men should be treated to a young roasted donkey.” He goes on to note, probably with some pent-up bitterness, that it would rather be to the company’s advantage if the Japanese guests wouldn’t come around so much to be entertained as it would surely save the company a pretty penny.

The aforementioned feast was not a rare occasion on Deshima. We read of several occasions when the Dutch entertained their Japanese hosts with a formal meal, and even more occasions when Japanese officials called at the island and were invariably entertained with food and drink. In short, much like today, food and drink served a number of functions depending on the occasion: sharing a meal could serve as a social lubricant between people who were of very different social and economic classes, not to mention from totally separate cultural worlds; food and drink could serve as an expression of gratitude for service rendered, or in other words, a thank-you gift given either by the Japanese or by the Dutch; a shared meal could serve as a venue in which to discuss matters both personal and professional; and finally, food and drink were often used by both the Japanese and the Dutch as formal gift items, both between individuals and between the company and the shogunal officials in Nagasaki and Edo.

For this book, the Page 99 Test works in part, but only in part. The reader is given a snapshot of how material culture was used on the Dutch trading post in Japan to break down barriers between Dutch merchants and Japanese officials. Food and drink were used as formal gift items, for example gifts of wine for the shogun and his officials, but they were also used as informal mechanisms with which to curry favor with local officialdom. In that sense, page 99 illustrates the general premise of the book, which is that gift giving was both a formal and informal mechanism to smooth relations between the Dutch and the shogunal court, especially when relations between the Japanese and foreigners were quite strained in the seventeenth century. The fact that gift-giving was such a prominent part of both personal and professional life on the tiny island of Deshima century after century is a testament to its importance.

Another way that page 99 serves to illustrate the premise of the book is to highlight the exasperation the Dutch felt at having to continually ply their Japanese hosts with gifts, both large and small. These gifts were often accompanied by intrusions into Dutch personal space as officials and their entourages came to gawk at the foreignness of the Dutch and to receive the requisite hospitality. It was one thing to write formal gift giving off the cost of doing business in Japan, which the Dutch East India Company did year after year, but quite another altogether to entertain Japanese guests of varying degrees of importance on an almost daily basis.

What page 99 leaves out is the larger context within which Dutch gift-giving should be viewed. The Japanese had expelled all European merchants in about 1640, save for a handful of Dutch merchants on a tiny, man-made island in the far southwest of the country. Dutch gift-giving served initially as a way to demonstrate that the Dutch were essentially paying tribute to the Tokugawa family which consolidated control over all of Japan only a few decades earlier. In this context, Dutch gifts served to bolster the authority of the Tokugawa vis-à-vis other prominent warrior families after a long period of political instability, and also served to illustrate, through ostentatious and highly orchestrated Dutch visits to the shogun’s capital, that the Tokugawa were the rightful rulers of Japan.

Learn more about The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan at the Bloomsbury Academic website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ken Dark's "Archaeology of Jesus' Nazareth"

Ken Dark is an archaeologist and historian principally researching the 1st millennium AD in Europe and the Middle East, and the relevance of the past to contemporary societies. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and taught at Oxford, Cambridge and Reading Universities before moving to King's College London. He has also been a visiting Professor at the University of Navarra. He is the author of over 100 academic publications, has directed many excavations and surveys, and is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Royal Historical Society, and Royal Anthropological Institute.

Dark applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Archaeology of Jesus' Nazareth, and reported the following:

Most of this page outlines the career of the American scholar, Dr Eugenia Nitowski (1949-2007), at various times in her varied career a student of healthcare, African ‘bush pilot’, a Carmelite nun, and – importantly for this book – a ‘biblical archaeologist’. Nitowski is relevant to the archaeology of Nazareth as the only person prior to the author to propose a programme of fieldwork on the crucial site of the Sisters of Nazareth convent subsequent to the (literally) ground-breaking excavation by the convent's nuns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the important subsequent studies by Henri Senès, a Jesuit priest, in the mid-twentieth century. Nitowski’s proposed study of the site was never realised, and was misguided in its methodology, but is significant for the history of the archaeological study of the Sisters of Nazareth site.

Looking at page 99 alone would give a misleading impression of the book as a whole.

Page 99 is part of a three-chapter history of the archaeological excavation and survey of the Sisters of Nazareth site, including an account of my own work at that site between 2006-2010. Using up to date 21st-century archaeological methods, this enabled me to disentangle more than century of discoveries at the convent, revealing a long sequence of structures from a first-century house to what may be the city's Byzantine cathedral and a Crusader pilgrimage church. The sequence is of importance for the archaeological study of Nazareth and more broadly for a wide range of themes in the archaeology of the Roman, Byzantine and Crusader periods.

Learn more about Archaeology of Jesus' Nazareth at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meg Russell & Lisa James's "The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit"

Meg Russell is Professor of British and Comparative Politics and Director of the Constitution Unit at University College London. She is particularly known for her work on parliament, having published books on the House of Lords, the legislative process and parliament's policy influence.

Lisa James is a Research Fellow at the Constitution Unit, where she focuses on the UK parliament. From 2019-22 she worked on the ESRC-funded 'Brexit, Parliament and the Constitution' project.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit falls, neatly, at the very start of a chapter:

Theresa May had won the Conservative leadership contest in 2016 on a promise to steady the party, and to deploy her considerable political experience to deliver Brexit. She also explicitly pledged that she would do so without calling a potentially destabilizing early general election. However, as the reality of implementing Brexit sank in, and with the new Prime Minister riding high in the polls, she was persuaded to break that pledge. But rather than increasing May’s majority, and strengthening her hand in parliament, the June 2017 election resulted in the loss of the Conservative majority, and she spent the remainder of her premiership as head of a minority government. This was a governing form relatively unfamiliar at Westminster, which required both skills and strategies inaccessible to May.

This brief summary paragraph is a fair representation of our aims in writing the book. We sought to blend a narrative account of the Brexit process in parliament with more thematic reflections – both explaining a lengthy and complex story, and asking what it can tell us about bigger political science questions such as the role of legislatures versus executives, the dangers of populism or, as here, how minority governments can operate in majoritarian systems.

However, the page is a little less representative when it comes to subject matter. Brexit is a multi-faceted topic, and other authors have written compelling analyses of public opinion, the negotiations with the EU, and the machinations at the heart of Number 10, among other subjects. We address Brexit as an essentially parliamentary story: from the backbench pressures for a referendum on EU membership, through the painful and extended wrangling in the House of Commons over the form Brexit should take, to Boris Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of parliament. But inevitably, in a story driven partly by the major electoral events of one referendum and two general elections, some chapters must focus on events outside Westminster. This is one of them.

Its events are critical to the overall narrative. Theresa May had become Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party shortly after the 2016 referendum, following David Cameron’s resignation. She inherited a slim parliamentary majority, and a divided and bruised party. The task of uniting Conservative MPs around anything more concrete than the general principle of leaving the European Union would have been near-impossible for even the most imaginative and unifying leader; it fell to the tribal and rigid May. So, having triggered Article 50 – i.e. formally notified the EU of the UK’s decision to leave – she called a general election, hoping to win a large enough majority to sideline dissenters in her own party. But the gamble failed, and May’s authority was wrecked. As we describe in the later chapters of the book, this outcome – a minority government, a divided party, and a weakened leader – lay the ground for two years of increasingly bitter wrangling and, ultimately, for the populist premiership of Boris Johnson.

Learn more about The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patti Tamara Lenard's "Democracy and Exclusion"

Patti Tamara Lenard is Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Democracy and Exclusion, and reported the following:

It is common to believe that states have a right to control their borders, and thereby can make choices about whom to admit – as tourists, labourers, immigrants – and whom to exclude. One of the most visible ways in which states control admission and exclusion is via the visa systems: as many readers will know, if you wish to enter another country, a first step is to acquire the appropriate visa.

As page 99 of Exclusion and Democracy summarizes, acquiring this visa is a multi-step process, and whether the process is difficult or easy to manage depends a good deal on where one holds citizenship and where one wants to go. Visas are one of many ways that states exclude unwanted people from its territory; and states also exclude individuals who reside on their territory from acquiring citizenship and the protective benefits this status offer. Indeed, page 99 is emblematic of the theme I explore in my book, namely, whether and when exclusion from a state’s territory and membership can be justified. I argue that exclusion, from territory and from membership, can rarely be defended.

Exclusion and Democracy is a case-based assessment of the permissibility and justifiability of states’ choices with respect to whom to include and whom to exclude. It takes seriously that exclusion is harmful – in several recent introductions to my book, I say to audiences that its origin story is in the choice a classmate made to exclude my oldest daughter from her birthday party, and the harm this choice generated, even though it was perfectly within the classmate’s right to do so. This harm is sometimes impermissible, as for example it is when states adopt racist criteria to exclude refugees and immigrants or when they refuse to grant citizenship to stateless peoples. But sometimes it is permissible according to the rules of democratic justice, but should be avoided anyway, since it is harmful to those who are excluded, as is sometimes the case where states adopt strict rules around citizenship tests and citizenship oath ceremonies. In nearly all cases, we can be guided by what democratic theorists call the “all-subjected” principle, to understand who deserves inclusion: all those who are subject to the law of a state, on an ongoing, life-shaping basis, are entitled to be protected from forced exclusion, in the form of citizenship status.

My objective is to speak to many audiences, including applied political theorists who are keen to discuss the relevance and application of principles of democratic justice; policy-makers who have the discretion to press policies in the direction of justice, even if only at the margins; and those who have no real experience of the harms that travel with exclusion and, importantly, with persistent threats of exclusion from one or both of territory or membership.

Learn more about Democracy and Exclusion at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lorraine Mangione & Donna Luff's "Mary Climbs In"

Lorraine Mangione, professor of clinical psychology at Antioch University New England, focuses on women in many aspects of who they are; creativity and artistry; group therapy; spirituality and religion; aging, loss, and grief; Italian American culture; mentoring; and #MeToo in her clinical and research work and publications. She is the coauthor of Daughters, Dads, and the Path through Grief: Tales from Italian America, as well as articles integrating Springsteen and psychology.

Donna Luff is a British-born writer and sociologist, an educator at Boston Children’s Hospital, and faculty at Harvard Medical School. She has published on gender, sexuality, and health care innovations and taught widely on qualitative research practice. She is author of several personal essays, as well as articles on Springsteen, and coauthor of a prior chapter on Springsteen’s women fans.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Mary Climbs In: The Journeys of Bruce Springsteen's Women Fans, and reported the following:

“Who am I? How did I come to be who I am? What am I meant to do and to be in life?” (McAdams, 2013). Those are the central questions raised on page 99, as part of a narrative psychologist’s view of how it is people figure out who they are and what the meaning and purpose of their life might be, what Dan McAdams calls the autobiographical author approach to constructing one’s identity. Figuring that out, becoming the author of one’s own life, is a developmental process that involves the culture, one’s history, the present, and the future, and is especially important during emerging adulthood although it can continue throughout the life span. For some women, their fan relationship with Springsteen and his work are highly intertwined with this process of figuring out who they are and how to make meaning in their life. The words “spiritual expedition” open the page and signal the depth of Springsteen’s meaning.

Page 99 dives deeply into the psychology behind our book, the emphasis on spiritual, psychological, and personal growth and identity. But the heart and soul of our book are the words of women fans who responded to our two surveys through Backstreets.com, a Springsteen fan website. And that is what is missing on this page. So, while it doesn’t fully represent the book, it does hint at some critical elements of it. We showcase women fans’ journeys through life as interwoven with Springsteen and his work, and psychology helps us to understand those processes. These themes, taken from page 99, underscore our message:

• "Some women see Springsteen as mirroring their own struggles, including how they might grow through them"
• "McAdams emphasizes the importance of the stories that people live by and of authoring one’s own sense of meaning and identity throughout the life span."
• "This developmental process may be occurring with some women fans, and it continues on in life."

The concepts of personal growth and development underlie our work, but the most essential parts are the responses from women fans: the emotions, honesty, thoughtfulness, faith, and love they share.

Women’s stories illuminate how Springsteen fandom has shaped their lives. The book’s themes, that emerged from their responses to our surveys, are about relationship, meaning-making, healing, personal growth, creating the self and identity, as well as the power of belonging to a fan community. Centrally, we explore how many women experience their fandom as a kind of relationship. Women referred to Springsteen variously as like a close friend or family member, a guide or teacher, or even a therapist. Here are just a couple of examples of their words, from a long-term fan and from a young fan:

“I sure do (have a relationship with him), he is a part of my life as a friend who gives me comfort, makes me happy and ... he just belongs to me! Although I know, he doesn’t know me and doesn’t even know I exist.”

“I feel like he means everything he says, he cares about the issues, and he cares about the E Street Band….it is because of his strong and passionate love that he fights against the injustices in the world, and has the energy and power to do so, thus inspiring me and my family to love more and fight more for what we love.”

Learn more about Mary Climbs In at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian McAllister Linn's "Real Soldiering"

Brian McAllister Linn is professor of history at Texas A&M and the author of The Philippine War, 1899–1902, The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War, and other books.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Real Soldiering: The US Army in the Aftermath of War, 1815-1980, and reported the following:

Page 99 provides examples of the ’skeletonized’ US Army officer corps in the decade after the end of World War 1. It briefly discusses the careers of officers who would later become famous such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Matthew B. Ridgway and the inadequate pay and wretched living conditions that most junior officers endured.

Real Soldiering is a comparative historical analysis of the US Army’s experience in the decade after every major war. The book’s central argument is that in many ways this experience follows a common pattern of a brief period of reform followed by a long period of stagnation, insufficient resources, and the ‘hollowing out’ of the field forces. The book looks at similarities in the how the lessons of the recent war were assimilated, the adaptation to new missions, continental and overseas deployments, the officer corps (and especially the experience of junior officers), the acquisition, training, and retention of (or inability to retain) enlisted personnel, and how the army prepared for the next war. Page 99 would provide the reader with a basic understanding of a primary argument in Real Soldiering—that armies transitioning from war to peace have to engage in a prolonged and traumatic period of recovery.

Real Soldiering grew out of my belief that neither soldiers nor civilians had much understanding of what happens when a professional army after a war is over. In most histories, postwar armies are of interest as prewar armies—and historians focus on the individuals, doctrines, technologies, etc. that proved decisive in the next conflict. My book argues that postwar armies need to be studied as distinct military entities. By examine the US Army from the decade after the War of 1812 to a decade after the Vietnam War, I am able to make comparisons, highlight similarities, and challenge much of the existing literature.

Learn more about Real Soldiering at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert P Crease's "The Leak"

Robert P Crease is a philosopher and historian of science at Stony Brook University. In 2021 he received the Lord Kelvin medal and prize for 21 years of his “Critical Point” column explaining humanities concepts for scientists, and scientific ideas to humanists.

Crease applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and reported the following:

Page 99, prefaced by a sentence and sentence-fragment from page 98 for comprehension:

The trio were frustrated at how little their voices were being heard. Week after week, militant activists turned up at meetings – some dressed in lurid costumes – stated their positions in over-the-top language, and instead of staying to discuss with the scientists they would leave to be interviewed by reporters. The activists were more colorful than the scientists, and the ones who got standing that night on the news.

Over the next few days, Graves, Ocko, and Shanklin canvassed friends to see if any wanted to create an informal action group. They shared “a sense of outrage,” Shanklin put it, over the difference between “the way Newsday, politicians and activists reported news about the lab” and their own experiences. Shanklin, who had been at the lab half a dozen years, found it “a place where intellectual contribution was valued above numbers of published papers. A place where, if someone was ill, people got together to help the family. A place where newcomers from the outside were welcomed with information, help and support. In short, it just seemed like a place that had values that really mattered.”

Bioinformatics specialist Sean McCorkle was interested. He had attended a Forbes town hall and had been terrified. “I thought, ‘This is what it must have felt like to be a 14-year-old girl charged with witchcraft in the 1600s,’” he said. “People were saying that Brookhaven had nuclear weapons and was carrying on human radiation experiments and was poisoning the water. It was like an X Files episode—but they believed it was real. When I came home I had to have a couple of beers to calm down.” In McCorkle’s high school days in Maryland he had read science books with pictures of Brookhaven and its discoveries. “I assumed everyone knew about the lab,” he said. “I found it astounding that people who lived a mile away didn’t know much about it, and shocking that some people thought it was evil.”

Joanna Fowler, who was still running her “Looking for Trouble” group, was also interested. “We were in a place we’d never been,” she recalled. “We were realizing how precious the lab was, the freedom we had in it, and how important that was to young scientists. I loved the lab, and I was afraid we’d lose it.”

Astoundingly, readers of page 99 find themselves at the core of the story. The book is about people from different backgrounds and disciplines who suddenly find themselves joining together to confront an existential threat. Agenda-driven politicians, sensationalizing media, and militant activists have promoted fake facts and unfounded conspiracies to destroy the work of their important, safely operating, scientific laboratory. Page 99 happens to be the transition moment, when it dawns on these individuals that it’s not enough to think “Science will prevail” or that the government will step in and set things right. They have to act.

The book is about an early warning signal what’s happening today in episodes like global warming, vaccines, and other areas where science matters – and what needs to be done long before page 99.

Visit Robert P Crease's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua May's "Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science"

Joshua May is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind (2018) and co-editor of Agency in Mental Disorder (2022).

May applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science, and reported the following:

Readers who open Neuroethics to page 99 will find themselves in the chapter on mental illness, which asks whether having a mental disorder excuses one from blame for unethical behavior. Consider the case of Eddie Ray Routh, a former marine who like many other veterans suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, among other afflictions. In 2013, at a shooting range in Texas, Routh killed two men, one of whom was military hero Chris Kyle (the subject of Clint Eastwood’s 2014 film American Sniper).

Such crimes are extremely rare among those with psychiatric disorders. But is blame inappropriate for these or other immoral actions—such as lying, cheating, and stealing—even if caused in part by a neurological condition?

Page 99 begins the argument that having a mental disorder does not by itself excuse immoral acts. We should adopt a more nuanced approach that takes into account that mental disorders present along a wide spectrum. Some people with PTSD exhibit great levels of agency and autonomy. Others don’t, or do so only occasionally. It depends on the individual and the circumstances—not on whether a diagnostic label is appropriate.

Mental illness is just one topic among others in the book, from free will to brain reading technologies. But the Page 99 Test works quite well, since this nuanced view is central to the book’s framework and overall message. Neuroethics urges us to approach all of neuroscience with nuance. Labeling someone with a neurological condition doesn’t tell us anything about their self-control, identity, or moral responsibility.

Instead, neuroscience increasingly demonstrates that the neurotypical and atypical are more alike than unalike. Neurotypical humans are frequently driven by automatic and unconscious processes that render us less free will than we tend to think (chapter 2). Even neuroscientists themselves can be found rationalizing questionable research practices (chapter 8). Ultimately, the neurotypical exhibit less agency than we often accord them, while patients with psychiatric conditions generally exhibit more agency (chapter 4). The same goes for addicts whose brains are manipulated by dopamine (chapter 5) and patients whose brains are manipulated by drugs and implants (chapter 3). Agency abounds in all of these cases, even if it ebbs and flows over time for the neurotypical and atypical alike.

Neurotechnologies are rapidly becoming more commonplace in medicine, law, and the marketplace. Brain stimulation and psychedelics are being used to treat mental disorders, including addiction and depression. Brain scans are being used in the courtroom to help determine guilt or innocence. And brain-computer interfaces, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, are being developed for ordinary consumer use. Neuroethics urges us to keep nuanced ethical analysis trained on these exciting and ominous advancements without alarmism or overhype.

Visit Josh May's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Felicia Arriaga's "Behind Crimmigration"

Felicia Arriaga is an Assistant Professor role at Baruch College in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. Her research interests are in the areas of race and ethnicity, immigration, and crimmigration (criminalization of immigration policy and procedure) aka La Polimigra.

Arriaga applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a great introduction to what Behind Crimmigration is all about, but readers may not understand the full complexity of the term collective amnesia that I’ve included without reading the whole chapter. Page 99 is the concluding page of Chapter 4 titled, "Collective Amnesia: White Innocence and Ignorance in the Devolution of Immigration Enforcement."

As previously discussed, at first, community members noted the blatant policing of their communities in the initial years of the program, but once that overt form of policing ended, more covert practices were not interrogated, contributing to the normalization of the program. The lack of transparency regarding the number of deportations and practices within the jail also bolstered this normalization. Many community members (both pro-and anti-immigrant) who may have involved themselves in the adoption process did not remain involved in accountability processes. In communities where a formal community input process was undertaken, pro-immigrant forces became frustrated with the silencing of their voices, and some settled for limited versions of immigration enforcement. By no means did these community members remove themselves entirely from related efforts, but many saw that traditional routes (appeals to city and county governments) to combat the program were exhausted. On the other hand, overtly anti-immigrant segments of these communities, albeit not entirely pleased by the level of immigration enforcement practices, were more aligned with the desires of law enforcement to enter into such agreements.

Collective amnesia of the impetus of the program (both in process and rhetoric) ensured these practices became invisible. Changes in 2015, requiring sheriff departments to host 287(g) steering committee meetings to discuss the mission and results of the program, are making the program more visible. In the initial adoption of the programs, county commissioners signed off on the MOA (Memorandum of Agreement) between the sheriff’s departments and ICE. In subsequent renewal periods, only the sheriff’s department signed off on the agreement, neutralizing the need and responsibility of county commissioners to be involved in the process. In recent 287(g) meetings, sheriff department representatives ignore the initial impetus for the program and deflect any anti-immigrant sentiments that previously existed by suggesting, “that was a different administration,” although they are unwilling to describe any adjustments in the implementation of the program. Financial benefits of the program were one of the most visible aspects of the program, yet also part of this collective amnesia, even when elected officials and law enforcement leadership were certainly aware of this.

While the book is about North Carolina, page 99 also reflects a process that I’ve seen happen in other localities across the country (without mentioning NC in this excerpt), so the summarized process is something I’m interested in exploring further in my research. While readers may be able to draw their own conclusions about the term collective amnesia, earlier in this chapter I describe this term as it was developed by Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract. While conducting research for this book, I was surprised to hear justifications and rhetorical maneuvers to distance from what I call blatantly racist beginnings of these immigration enforcement partnerships. And I was even more surprised that people were surprised to know that the partnerships still existed—a phenomenon I call the normalization of the programs. In looking for relevant literature to help me process this, I found The Racial Contract to be useful in explaining why this was the case. In that book, Charles W. Mills writes that collective amnesia, as it pertains to race, allows for “conflicting judgements about what is important in the past and what is unimportant” and as the quote shown below states, “so applying this to race, there will obviously be an intimate relationship between white identity, white memory, and white amnesia, especially about nonwhite victims.”

This idea of memory making and understanding the overall narrative of immigration enforcement was not the initial focus of this book but has become central to future projects, especially because the “official” record and narrative often demonizes immigrant communities without including their voices. I wanted to pinpoint this in the book to also encourage white people who might read the book to consider how their non-involvement (either never being involved or some involvement that has stopped) contributes to the continuation and proliferation of immigration enforcement practices.

On a related note, what’s also missing from this page is an introduction (which briefly comes on the next page) to the resistance aspect of the book. The following chapter is called "Melting ICE," which dives into the places across the state where community members pushed back against the normalization of immigration enforcement partnerships.

Visit Felicia Arriaga's website.

--Marshal Zeringue