According to Newton, the inmates had refused to continue eating starches and split-pea soup at every meal.

Newton had been made a “trustee” of the Warden, meaning he had more freedom to move from cell block to cell block. Since he was the only trustee that participated in the hunger strike, the administration believed he must have been the one who organized the large-scale strike. Newton admitted to having carried a few messages, but denied organizing the event.

While most prisoners broke after a few days, Newton claims to have made it the full 15 days. He was then taken out to be examined by doctors and a psychiatrist. When they determined he was still in a relatively good state, he was put back in the hole for another 15 days.

Soul breakers exist because the authorities know that such conditions would drive them to the breaking point, but when I resolved that they would not conquer my will, I became stronger than they were. I understood them better than they understood me. No longer dependent on the things of the world, I felt really free for the first time in my life. I the past I had been like my jailers; I had pursued the goals of capitalistic America. Now I had a higher freedom…Even so, the way I was treated told me a lot about those who devised such punishment. I know them well.

After spending one month of his six month sentence in the soul-breaker, he was transferred to a low-security prison camp. Unfortunately, he got into a fight with another prisoner who served food in the mess hall, and ended up back in Alameda County – in the soul-breaker – for the rest of his sentence.

Bojak was a diligent enforcer of small helpings…whenever Bojack turned away, I would dip for more with my spoon. One day he tried to prevent me from dipping, and I called him for protecting the oppressor’s interests and smashed him with a steel tray.

In Newton’s time in solitary, he said he “learned the secrets of survival”. Due to the fact he had to urinate and defecate where he slept, one of these secrets:

..was the same that Mahatma Gandhi learned – to take little sips of nourishment, just enough to keep up one’s strength, but never enough to have to defecate until the fifteen days were up.

The most crucial thing he learned while in solitary was the importance of stimulation to the human brain. The effect that long-term sensory deprivation has on the brain is one reason solitary confinement is considered torture by international human rights organizations.

In deprivation, you have to somehow replace the stimuli, provide an interior environment for yourself…I began to reflect on the most soothing parts of my past..[But] when I had a pleasant memory, what was I to do with it?..If you are not disciplined, a strange thing happens. The pleasant thought comes, and then another and another…at first they are organized. Then they start to pick up speed, pushing in on top of one another…the pleasant thoughts are not so pleasant now; they are horrible and grotesque caricatures, whirling around in your head…Over a span of time – I do not know how long it took – I mastered my thoughts. I could start and stop them…It was a very conscious exercise.

Newton reflected on the conditions on the “soul-breakers” in his personal writings:

..each was four and a half feet wide, by six feet long, by ten feet high. The floor was dark red rubber tile, and the walls were black…I was always kept in the dark, and nude…Sometimes the prisoner in the other cell would get a blanket, but they never gave me one…There was no bunk, no washbasin, no toilet, nothing but bare floors, bare walls, a solid steel door, and a round hole four inches in diameter and six inches deep in the middle of the floor…A half-gallon milk carton filled with water was my liquid for the week. Twice a day and always at night the guards brought a little cup of cold split-pea soup, right out of the can.

According to close friend and Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, Newton didn’t learn to read until he was 16.

Embarrassed by his illiteracy and determined to keep up with his older siblings' academic strides, he taught himself to read with the assistance of an older brother.

Newton would go on to demonstrate a high level of intelligence, earning college degrees and writing academic papers. So why didn’t he learn to read throughout his early school years? According to Sociologist Claude M. Steele, it is caused by much more than just socioeconomic inequality of the schools:

The subtle and pervasive messages with which black students are bombarded–that they are intellectually inferior; that there is no place for them in the ranks of the educated and successful–often causes them to refocus their energies outside of school.

State repression is a mechanism of state influence that involves force or the threat of force used in an effort to:

1. Counter and/or eliminate domestic challenges.
2. Create specific political-economic arrangements.
3. Sustain domestic order as well as political-economic arrangements once they have been established.

As previously noted the treatment of blacks in America would not traditionally constitute a form of “imperialism”. However, as Edward Said made clear in his work on post-colonialism (see Orientalism):

Imperial power is constructed on a bedrock not only of force but of culture as well. Culture provides the underpinning, justification and validation of empire. Its crudest manifestation is perhaps Kipling’s “White man’s burden.”

In this, we see that imperialism is not just accepted by the citizens of an Empire, but directly reinforced by the public and their culture, of which black people were forced to live under.

These two -isms are often tied inextricably with, or are based on the same oppressive logic as, models of imperialism and capitalism. Both racism and fascism inherently lead to subjugation of another group, whether on the basis of race or national origin.

In general, racism is the belief that the human species can be sub-divided into races, each having their own specific traits, abilities, etc. A corollary to this is that individuals within a “race” are not actually individuals at all, but products of their race’s inherent characteristics. Similarly, fascism is an extremist ideology exalting the State/Nation as a single organic entity, outside of which no individual human or spiritual values can exist.

While fascism tends to happen on the global scale, i.e. this nation is inherently better than that nation, racism happens on a local/regional scale. Nonetheless, you can see the similarities in the reasoning behind both systems of belief.