Jean Pfaelzer discusses recasting history in 'California, a Slave State,' which tracks the record of racism and forced labor that drove the state's 'startup' culture.
on a marijuana farm in Northern California, where she had been kept in a box and abused with a cattle prod. Pfaelzer’s creeping epiphany became a full-blown thesis: California, cemented in the American mind since at least the Civil War as the beacon of freedom and opportunity, was — and remains — a slave state. “It’s not like I didn’t really know,” she says.
. “Men were shipping out and buying stuff,” Pfaelzer says. “That store put me and my siblings through UC Berkeley.”My own American story helped shape what I too thought about California — at least until I read Pfaelzer’s book. My parents came, fleeing the South and the ravages of racism along with scores of relatives. I like to say I’m fortunate to have landed in California.
A key revelation for Pfaelzer is that California, admitted to the union as a free state in 1850, adopted a constitution that claimed it would never “tolerate” slavery — a legally hazy term that allowed the institution to survive and evolve in a state vested in remaining white. After Congress passed the, California followed suit with a state Supreme Court decision in 1852, ruling that Black slaves brought in pre-statehood were primarily property.
embedded in the 13th Amendment — Pfaelzer lays out the way California virtually invented the prison industrial complex. In her framing, prison was yet another startup business in a state that in the 1800s still largely lacked institutions and infrastructure.was conceived by an enterprising former slave owner who worked with the state legislature to cultivate another class of free labor with convicts, many of whom were nonwhites serving time for minor offenses such as vagrancy.
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