The Nation, March 17, 2021
The History of Freedom Is a History of Whiteness
A conversation with Tyler Stovall about his recent book White Freedom
and whether or not the legacy of liberty can break away from racial
exclusion and domination.
By Daniel Steinmetz-JenkinsTwitter
In his new book, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, the
historian Tyler Stovall seeks to offer a new approach to the
relationship between freedom and race in modern Western societies. This
approach reveals a different historical perspective for understanding
how the Enlightenment era, which provided the basis for modern Western
conceptions of human freedom, coincided with the height of the
transatlantic slave trade, and for how the United States could be
founded simultaneously upon ideas of both liberty and African slavery,
Native American genocide and systematic racial exclusion.
Stovall does so by arguing for an alternative explanation to what he
describes as the standard “paradoxical” interpretation of freedom and
race. “If liberty represents the acme of Western civilization,” says
Stovall, “racism—embodied above all by horrible histories like the slave
trade and the Holocaust—is its nadir.” In other words, the paradoxical
approach sees freedom and race as opposites. This means that there is
nothing about freedom that is inherently racialized. The relationship
between freedom and race from this perspective, argues Stovall, is due
more to “human inconsistencies and frailties than to any underlying logics.”
Stovall challenges the paradoxical view by arguing that there is no
contradiction between freedom and race. Instead, he thinks that ideas of
freedom in the modern world have been racialized, and that whiteness and
white racial identity are intrinsic to the history of modern liberty.
Hence Stovall’s notion of white freedom.
Stovall’s book aims to tell the history of white freedom from the French
and American revolutions to the present. But to what extent can the vast
history of modern freedom be reduced to white freedom? How can white
freedom account for class differences? Moreover, if modern freedom is
racialized how is it to be differentiated from fascism and others forms
of white nationalism? And can political freedom break away from the
legacy of white freedom? To answer these questions, I spoke with Stovall
about the history of US slavery and immigration, the fascism of Benito
Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Trumpism, and Joe Biden’s recent election to
the White House.
—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
DANIEL STEINMETZ-JENKINS: Can you explain your concept of white freedom?
TYLER STOVALL: In this study I argue that white freedom, which is a
concept of freedom conceived and defined in racial terms, underlies and
reflects both white identity and white supremacy: To be free is to be
white, and to be white is to be free.
DSJ: Your thinking on white freedom has been strongly influenced by
whiteness studies. Can you explain the connection between the two?
TS: Whiteness studies starts from the proposition that whiteness is not
simply the neutral, unexamined gold standard of human existence, arguing
instead that white identity is racial, and white people are every bit as
much racialized beings as are people of color. White Freedom explores
the ways in which the ideal of freedom is a crucial component of white
identity in the modern world, that great movements for liberty like the
American and French revolutions or the world wars of the 20th century
have constructed freedom as white. More generally, this book follows the
tradition of whiteness studies in considering how an ideology
traditionally viewed as universal in fact contains an important racial
dimension. I argue that frequently, although by no means always, in
modern history, freedom and whiteness have gone together, and the ideal
of freedom has functioned to deny the realities of race and racism.
DSJ: How might you respond to the criticism that your notion of white
freedom is potentially monolithic? How do you account for its diverse
historical application and impact, especially concerning class differences?
TS: I would begin by saying that white freedom is by no means the only
kind of freedom, that in modern history other, more inclusive visions of
liberty have frequently opposed it, and those visions have often
interacted and mutually reinforced each other. One thinks, for example,
of the rise of the movements for women’s suffrage in 19th-century
Britain and America out of the struggles to abolish slavery. The concept
of white freedom does position race at the center of the history of
liberty, something I found it necessary to do both because it has
frequently been left out or seen as peripheral to the story, and because
making it more central in my view offers new insights about the nature
of freedom in general.
Class differences, and the ways in which they have historically been
racialized, play an important role in the development of white freedom,
as well. The example of Irish immigrants during the 19th century
provides an interesting case in point. In both Britain and America,
Irish immigrants not only occupied the lowest rungs of society but were
frequently racialized as savage and nonwhite during the early parts of
the century. In Britain, integration into working class movements like
Chartism and the 1889 London dock strike to a certain extent brought
them white status, whereas in America the ability of the working-class
Irish to differentiate themselves, often violently, from African
Americans gradually helped enable their acceptance as white by the
dominant society, integrating them into American whiteness.
DSJ: You argue that the paradox of American slaveholders fighting for
liberty is not a paradox at all if one considers the racial dimensions
of the American idea of freedom during the American Revolution. Denying
freedom to Black slaves was not a contradiction, you show, because
freedom was reserved for whites. How does your thinking about white
freedom and slavery differ here from the notable The New York Times’
1619 Project, which caused a storm of controversy by arguing that the
American Revolution was primarily waged to preserve slavery?
TS: I think the 1619 Project’s argument that the founding fathers waged
the American Revolution in defense of slavery has much to recommend it,
although I think this debate could benefit from some nuance. Certainly
American slaveowners, who were amply represented among the proponents of
independence, worried about the implications of the 1772 Somerset case,
which banned slavery in Britain, for the colonies and their own
property. The 1775 call by Lord Dunmore, royal governor Virginia, to
American slaves to free their masters and fight for the British further
outraged them, leading them to condemn him in the Declaration of
Independence for having fostered domestic insurrections against the
colonists. It is also true that this question bitterly divided Northern
and Southern patriots, in ways that ultimately prefigured the Civil War.
It is quite possible that revolution devoted to abolishing slavery, as
many Northerners wanted, would have failed to enlist the support of
Virginia and other Southern colonies and thus would have gone down to
defeat. Whether or not that means that the Revolution’s primary goal was
the preservation of slavery was less clear.
However, there are other ways to approach this issue, which the current
debate has tended to neglect. First, one must consider the perspective,
and the actions, of the slaves themselves, who constituted roughly 20
percent of the population of colonial America. White Freedom not only
considers the question of slavery central to the American Revolution but
also sees the Revolution as one of the great periods of slave resistance
and revolt in American history. Tens of thousands of slaves, including
17 belonging to George Washington himself, fled their plantations in an
attempt to reach the British lines and freedom. Whether or not white
patriots believed they were fighting for independence to preserve
slavery, many of their slaves certainly did, and acted on that belief
with their feet. American history to this day praises Blacks like
Crispus Attucks who fought for the Revolution, but ignores the much
larger number of American slaves who took up arms for the British. For
many African Americans, therefore, the American Revolution was certainly
a struggle for freedom, but for freedom from their white American owners
and the new independent nation they fought for.
Second, one should underscore the basic point that, whatever the
relative motivations of the patriots of 1776 in seeking freedom and
independence from Britain, the new United States of America they created
was a slave republic, and would remain so for the better part of a
century. It is certainly true that the Revolution resulted in the
abolition of slavery throughout the North after the Revolution, but that
did not change the fact that the overwhelming majority of African
Americans were slaves before 1776 and remained so for decades
thereafter. Moreover, far from a relic of an imperial past, slavery
proved to be a dynamic and central part of America’s economy and society
during the early 19th century. Whether or not American patriots revolted
to preserve slavery, the success of their revolt did exactly that,
creating a new nation that largely reserved freedom for whites.
DSJ: The Statue of Liberty might be considered the most well-known
symbol of freedom in the modern world. You provocatively state that “it
is the world’s greatest representation of white freedom.” Why is this
the case?
TS: The Statue of Liberty symbolizes white freedom in several respects.
In my book I analyze how both its French origins and its establishment
in America underscore that perspective, and in doing so illustrate the
history of white freedom in both nations. In France the image of the
statue drew upon the tradition of Marianne, or the female revolutionary,
most famously depicted in Eugène Delacroix’s great painting Liberty
Leading the People. Yet at the same time it represented a domesticated,
nonrevolutionary vision of that tradition; whereas Delacroix’s Marianne
is carrying a rifle and leading a revolutionary army, the Statue of
Liberty stands demurely and without moving, holding a torch of
illumination rather than a flame of revolution. She is the image of the
white woman on a pedestal. The racial implications of this domestication
of liberty became much clearer in the United States: Although France
gave the statue to America to commemorate the abolition of slavery in
the United States, Americans soon ignored that perspective and instead
turned the statue into a symbol of white immigration. The broken chains
at Liberty’s feet that symbolized the freed slave were effectively
obscured by the pedestal and more generally by the racial imagery
surrounding the statue, and remain so to this day. America’s greatest
monument to freedom thus turned its back on America’s greatest freedom
struggle, because that struggle was not white.
Moreover, many Americans In the early 20th century considered the statue
an anti-immigrant symbol, the “white goddess” guarding America’s gates
against the dirty and racially suspect hordes from Europe. Only when the
immigrants, and more particularly their Americanized descendants, were
viewed and accepted as white did the Statue of Liberty embrace them. To
this day, therefore, America’s greatest monument to freedom represents
above all the history of white immigration. No equivalent memorials
exist on San Francisco’s Angel Island to commemorate Chinese
immigration, or on the US-Mexican border to memorialize those Americans
whose ancestors came from Latin America. The Statue of Liberty
effectively conceals the fact that New York City was itself a great
slave port, so that for many the arrival in the harbor represented
bondage, not liberty. Not only the statue’s white features, but its
racial history, make it for me the world’s greatest symbol of white freedom.
DSJ: One implication of your argument about white freedom is that it
suggests that the modern history of liberal thought actually shares
something in common with the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, namely
that both systems of government defined freedom in racial terms. What,
then, fundamentally distinguishes these understandings of freedom?
TS: As I and many other historians have argued, there are some
fundamental similarities between fascism and liberal democracy when it
comes to race. In some ways, the increasing emphasis on the role of the
state as the central locus and guarantor of freedom found its logical
culmination in the fascist state, which rejected individual liberty,
instead defining freedom as integration into the racial state. But I
would also point out two important differences. First, Fascist Italy and
Nazi Germany stated their commitment to a racist vision of freedom far
more explicitly and dramatically than did the democracies of the liberal
West. The Nazi vision of a racial hierarchy in Europe with Aryans had
none of the pretensions of uplift and stewardship found in Western
imperialism, but instead called for domination and ultimately genocide.
The horrors of the Shoah were a foretaste of what awaited Europe,
especially Eastern Europe, had Nazi Germany triumphed. The liberal
democracies of the West, for all their racism, did not share that
vision, were instead horrified by it, and in the end combined to destroy it.
Following from this point, I would also argue that, unlike liberal
democracy, European fascism developed in a climate of total war, which
fundamentally shaped its vision of race and freedom. Fascism and Nazism
were born at the tail end of World War I (both Hitler and Mussolini were
war veterans), and their histories culminated with World War II. The era
of total war powerfully reinforced state racism—the idea that the enemy
posed a biological threat to the nation. This happened in the West as
well, of course, but did not constitute the heart of national identity
in the same way. Moreover, unlike in fascist Europe, total war in the
West also created a massive movement against white freedom, for a
universal vision of liberty.
DSJ: I found your parts of the book on the end of the Cold War
fascinating. Regarding Eastern Europe, you write, “The overthrow of
communist regimes in this period happened in the whitest, most
‘European’ part of the world, one barely touched by the history of
European overseas colonialism or non-European immigration.” Does this
view of Eastern Europe fall prey to a mythology of white homogeneity,
which is exploited by white nationalist leaders in Eastern Europe today
driven by anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment? The region had long
had millions of immigrants from Central Asia.
TS: There are very few, if any, purely “white” parts of the world, and
Eastern Europe’s contacts with Asia go back at least to the Roman
Empire. There is, for example, an interesting history of Blacks in the
Soviet Union, which was itself a regime that spanned and brought
together Europe and Asia. I would nonetheless argue that, compared to
the rest of the continent and to the Americas, the peoples’ republics of
Eastern Europe lacked racial diversity, a situation that led many
American conservatives to embrace their resistance to the Soviets during
the Cold War as a struggle for white freedom. In the minds of many, the
liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet control represented a
continuation of the war against Nazi rule of Western Europe, an
unfinished campaign to ensure freedom for all white people. It was
counterintuitive to witness nations of white people as “captive” or
“enslaved,” so that the Cold War against Soviet Communism had an
important racial dimension. The collapse of the Soviet bloc represented
in theory the unification of white Europe, yet at the same time it
underscored the fact that Europe wasn’t really “white.” The dramatic
rise of ethnic and racial tensions in the former communist countries,
especially eastern Germany, after 1991 illustrated the extent to which
the victory of whiteness was not completely assured in the post-Soviet era.
DSJ: Do you understand Trumpism to be a white freedom backlash to the
Obama administration or in continuation with the longer history of white
freedom? Intellectuals and pundits, for example, are significantly
divided on the question of whether Trumpism is unleashing long-standing
fascist impulses in this country, especially given the events of January
6. Where do you stand?
TS: The Trump phenomenon certainly represents a backlash against the
Obama presidency, but it goes well beyond that. In my book I discuss how
the campaign for universal freedom represented by the campaign civil
rights and many other popular movements provoked the rise of the New
Right, which in many ways reinforced America’s history of white freedom.
The current Freedom Caucus of the House of Representatives, composed
overwhelmingly of white conservatives, exemplifies that. To an important
extent, Trumpism represents a continuation of that political movement
which triumphed under Ronald Reagan. At the same time, however, the
Trump presidency, in contrast with Reaganism, has sounded a defensive
and at times even desperate note, a fear for the survival of white
freedom. The election of Barack Obama demonstrated that a universal
vision of liberty could triumph at the highest levels of American
society and politics, prompting an anguished reaction that created the
Tea Party and other reactionary movements. The fact that Trump never won
a majority of the popular vote combined with the increasingly
multicultural and multiracial makeup of America’s population has led
many to believe that the days of white freedom are in fact numbered. The
fact that so many Americans cling to Donald Trump and his Republican
party, in spite of their outrageous and buffoonish behavior, I believe
arises out of this elemental fear.
I do believe events in America since the 2020 presidential election show
that Trumpism has the potential to morph into an outright fascist
movement. We have never in the modern era witnessed such an outright
attempt to overthrow the will of the electorate after an American
election, one grounded squarely in the fascist technique of the Big Lie.
It has represented the culmination of Republican party efforts to
suppress the ability of peoples of color to vote, efforts whose history
goes back to the white terrorist campaign against Reconstruction after
the Civil War. Moreover, I believe that if fascism does come to America,
it will come in the guise of white freedom. The insurrection of January
6 is a case in point. On that day America witnessed the spectacle of
thousands of mostly white demonstrators invading the US Capitol Building
and trying to overthrow the government. They proclaimed their movement
as a campaign to protect their freedoms, and were for the most part
allowed to depart peacefully after violently invading federal property.
If that didn’t demonstrate that whiteness remains an important part of
freedom in America, I don’t know what does.
DSJ: Given mainstream acceptance of Black Lives Matter and Biden’s
election to the White House, what do you see the implications to be for
white freedom today in this country?
TS: For me and many other African Americans, one of the most surprising
things about the murder of George Floyd was the intense reaction by so
many white people against the official brutalization of Blacks in
America. Leaving aside the rather belated nature of this reaction, or
the observation that a movement calling for the right of African
Americans not to be murdered is hardly radical, the mainstream
acceptance of Black Lives Matter does point to a new day in American
racial politics, a new affirmation of universal freedom.
Joseph Biden’s electoral victory, and his acknowledgment of his debt to
Black voters and voters of color, also suggests the limits of white
freedom in American politics. The fact remains, however, that 74 million
Americans voted to reelect Donald Trump. He continues to dominate the
base of the Republican Party and maintains a wide base of support in the
nation as whole. White freedom is in many ways on the defensive, but
that can make it more dangerous than ever. It also remains to be seen
how committed President Biden is to a progressive vision of liberty.
Initial signs seem encouraging, but during the election campaign he
boasted of his ability to work across the aisles with white Southern
senators to resist busing for school integration. Such bipartisanship in
the past led to Jim Crow and Black bodies swinging from trees. Hopefully
President Biden will prove more adept at resisting the Republicans’
siren song of white freedom.
DSJ: Finally, very little is mentioned in White Freedom about the
political tradition of democratic socialism, which is experiencing a
revival today. Do you believe it is a viable option for resisting white
freedom today?
TS: I think democratic socialism is not only viable but vital in the
struggle against white freedom. The fact that a significant segment of
the white working class has embraced Trumpism is by no means inevitable,
but rather speaks to the widespread conviction that the Democratic
establishment has abandoned the concerns of working people. Some people
who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 also supported Bernie Sanders, for
example. Right now in America one of the strongest reasons for the
survival of white freedom is the belief of many white workers that their
racial identity “trumps” their class position, that, in a political
world where no one stands up for working people and their interests,
racial privilege is their greatest asset. The election to the presidency
of a key member of the Democratic establishment like Joseph Biden does
not augur well in the short term for changing this perspective, yet as
the painstaking work of Stacey Abrams in Georgia has demonstrated there
is no substitute for long-term political organizing. Socialism does have
the potential to empower all people and thus demonstrate the universal
nature of liberty. Developing and actualizing that potential will be a
central part in the campaign to render white freedom history.
Daniel Steinmetz-JenkinsTWITTERruns a regular interview series with The
Nation. He is the managing editor of Modern Intellectual History and a
Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at Dartmouth College. He
is writing a book for Columbia University Press titled Raymond Aron and
Cold War Liberalism.
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