On the Contradictions of Liberty and Whiteness

 

We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy!

–W. E. B. Dubois, The Crisis, May 1919
 
Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa.
–South Africa Industrial Federation, 1922
 
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The years immediately after the Armistice, what the Italians call the biennio rosso, the “red two years,” were notable for extreme levels of political conflict and mobilization. Throughout much of the world revolution loomed on the horizon, or at least seemed to. The transition from world war to global peace brought about a range of revolutionary political activism striking not only in its intensity but equally in its scope and breadth. From the Seattle general strike in February to the Amritsar, India, massacre in April, popular radicalism seemed poised to overthrow the established order. At the heart of the turbulence lay the defeated empires of Europe and Euro-Asia.
 
The Russian revolutions of 1917 had made the new Soviet Union the world’s revolutionary center, not only fighting its own civil war against conservative forces but also loudly calling for and trying to mobilize world revolution. In the chaos following the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires at the end of 1918, different national and political constituencies struggled to create new regimes based on popular sovereignty. At the same time the dominant Allied powers, both during and after the Paris peace talks, sought to contain the forces pushing for a new world in the established structures of imperial power. During 1919 and 1920 in particular, the relationship between popular freedom and imperial hegemony seemed to hang in the balance.
 
One particularly important aspect of new ideas of freedom in the postwar era was the new acceptance of women’s suffrage. Women had played an active role in the war industries and public service of most belligerent nations, and in many they campaigned successfully for female suffrage after the war. From 1917 onward a large number of countries, including not only the United States and Britain but Russia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, all voted to grant women the vote in one form or another. Among Western nations France was the main holdout, not finally enfranchising women until after World War II. While granting women the vote certainly did not bring about full gender equality, it effectively doubled the number of active citizens in many nations and gave the idea of freedom a much more universal quality than before the war.
 
At the same time, women’s suffrage tended to reinforce white freedom. The new female suffrage movement applied almost entirely to white women in Western countries and had no impact on the situation of colonized women. African American women, like African American men, remained essentially disenfranchised after World War I. It is also important to note that in several countries, such as Britain, female enfranchisement was at least limited to women of property, only later being extended to working-class women. The great wave of women’s suffrage after World War I thus both expanded popular ideas of freedom and equally demonstrated the racial limits of that ideal.
 
As we have seen above, the new emphasis on national freedom reflected in the Treaty of Versailles had a significant racial component, promoting democratic nationalism in Europe while firmly shunting it aside in Africa and Asia. This contradiction did not pass unnoticed by many colonial subjects. As a result, 1919 in particular saw an eruption of anticolonial revolts. In Korea, students inspired by President Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech began organizing to demand the right of self-determination and independence from Japanese colonial rule.
 
On March 1, millions of Koreans demonstrated throughout the country against imperial control, only to be met with brutal repression by Japanese authorities, resulting in the deaths of thousands. Similar violence erupted in India a month later. After a British crackdown on civil liberties triggered a massive protest movement throughout the country, Indians gathered in the Punjabi town of Amritsar to defy colonial repression. Colonial troops led by General Reginald Dyer responded by closing of the gathering and raking the crowd with machine gun fire, killing at least several hundred individuals.
 
Events in Egypt and Ireland formed a partial exception to the rule of white freedom after World War I. In Egypt, popular expectations that Egyptian representatives would be able to attend the Paris peace conference provoked a conflict with the ruling British authorities. The movement soon began demanding the end of the British protectorate over Egypt and the Sudan. Led by the Wafd party (Wafd means “delegation” in Arabic), a series of massive demonstrations broke out in March, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of protestors at the hands of colonial troops. The movement continued into the summer, leading the British to appoint a commission, which eventually recommended the end of colonial rule. In 1922 Egypt achieved semi-independence, limited by Britain’s continuing right to maintain a military presence in the country and control of the Suez Canal.

 
In Ireland, the centuries-old struggle against British colonial rule came to a head in the years after World War I. British repression of the Easter Rising in 1916 had only increased Irish popular support for selfrule. In December 1918 the nationalist party, Sinn Féin, won an overwhelming victory during a national election, and the following month proclaimed independence for the island. Shortly thereafter the newly formed Irish Republican Army began a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British soldiers and institutions in the island. Britain responded in force, sending in the troops known as the Black and Tans, and for the next two years Ireland descended into violence and chaos. By 1921 the British concluded they could not win the war, and after extensive negotiations in 1922 the Irish Free State formally gained its independence.
 
Again, the examples of Egypt and Ireland complicate and also ultimately reinforce the importance of whiteness to national freedom in the aftermath of World War I. Unlike most of the imperial world, both were colonies that gained independence. For the Egyptians, however, this independence came with important limits, as would become clear during World War II, when the British essentially assumed control of the country. Irish independence was much more real, even though Ulster remained a part of the United Kingdom. When Ireland achieved independence it did so as a white European nation, similar to Poland and the other new nations of Eastern Europe. By the late nineteenth century Irish immigrants in both Britain and the US had largely achieved white status. The independence of the Irish nation in 1922 thus represented the culmination of that achievement in the home island itself. White Ireland could finally leave its colonial past behind, whereas brown Egypt could not.
 
The renewed emphasis on whiteness after World War I also took place within several Western nations. As we have seen, the war itself had brought large numbers of men of color to Europe, especially France, and in the United States had fueled the first Great Migration of African Americans to the North. The end of the war brought a powerful rejection of this wartime multiculturalism and a reassertion of whiteness, at times in conjunction with radical and revolutionary labor movements. The ultimate example of this came in 1922, when striking South African miners adopted the slogan Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa, but this was not an isolated incident.
 
The year 1919 in particular saw intense labor and revolutionary struggles as well as widespread race riots. From January to August of that year, for example, a series of riots erupted in Britain’s port cities, as white sailors and longshoremen attacked men from the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia and the Middle East. In a climate of postwar economic downturn, white port workers and their unions attacked nonwhites for “taking” their jobs, often successfully expelling them from increasingly white workplaces on the docks of Liverpool, Bristol, London, and other cities. This took place in a climate of radical working-class politics in general, so that in Glasgow Scottish workers seemed to threaten revolution.
 
The situation was more extreme in France. During the war France had brought in more than 300,000 workers from its colonies and China to labor in its factories and fields. With the end of the war, tensions increased between industry, the government, and the unions over the role of labor in the postwar period. Dazzled by the specter of the Russian Revolution, many French workers moved sharply to the left, leading to the creation of the French Communist Party at the end of 1920.
 
At the same time, however, France needed labor more than ever. Roughly 1.6 million Frenchmen had died in the war, and many more had returned wounded and unable to work. Moreover, the nation had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe and would soon achieve negative population growth in the interwar years, while at the same time it needed more workers to rebuild the country and repair the destruction caused by the war. In this revolutionary climate, however, the one thing all the major parties could agree on was the need to get rid of colonial workers. By the end of 1919 French authorities had rounded up and repatriated 90 percent of the “exotic” workers in the country. At the same time, it made new arrangements to bring foreign workers from Southern and Eastern Europe, whose numbers would swell to the millions in the 1920s.
 
In making the argument for European over colonial labor, French authorities made clear their desire to reverse the multiracial immigration that had begun during the war, saying “[It is necessary] To call upon labor of European origin, in preference to colonial or exotic labor, because of the social and ethnic difficulties which could arise from the presence upon French soil of ethnographic elements too clearly distinct from the rest of the population.” The choice of European over “exotic” workers was a clear statement of the importance of whiteness to the character of the nation, and it paralleled the contrast between the extension of liberal democracy in postwar Europe and the continuation of imperial rule in postwar Asia and Africa.
 
Britain and France had emerged victorious from a war that, especially toward its end, emphasized the struggle for national freedom against German barbarism. At the same time, they remained the largest colonial powers in the world. This contradiction between freedom at home and racialized empire overseas remained more salient than ever in the years after the Armistice. The war itself had undermined that contradiction to a certain extent by bringing colonial subjects to Europe as both soldiers and workers, and it was vital to the racial politics of empire to reverse that phenomenon, to keep metropole and colony separate. European nations could remain free only if the colonial lack of liberty was not allowed to intrude into their political spaces, and the repression and exclusion of colonial labor (who, unlike colonial soldiers, had a reason to stay in Europe once the fighting stopped) played an important role in that process. In order to survive in Europe at the end of the war, freedom had to be white freedom.
 
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Excerpted from White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea by Tyler Stovall. Princeton University Press, 2021.
 
On the Contradictions of Whiteness, Revolution, and Freedom. By Tyler Stovall, LitHub, January 19, 2021. 

Historian Tyler Stovall on "White Freedom and the Lady of Liberty". 
 
On January 5, 2018, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, DC, Tyler Stovall (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) delivered his presidential address on the Statue of Liberty, one of the most famous and recognizable images of freedom in the modern world, and a cherished national icon of the United States. His presentation considered an important yet usually unacknowledged part of the statue’s history: its role as a racial symbol. Looking at both the statue’s origins in France and its history as a public monument in America, Stovall explored its broader significance to the racialized nature of freedom in the modern world.
 
American Historical Association, January 23, 2018. 

The idea of freedom has a contradictory legacy in the modern western world: it’s all about whiteness mixed with practices of racial inequality and discrimination, argues Tyler Stovall, Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in his newly published work White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2021). In the interview that follows, Tyler Stovall discusses the main thesis of his book, highlights the difference in the way conservatives and progressives view freedom, and talks the return of white supremacy in American politics.
 
C. J. Polychroniou: You have just published a new book, titled White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, in which you argue that freedom has been defined in the western political tradition in racial terms. Can you elaborate a bit on this thesis?
 
Tyler Stovall: I argue that in America, France, and other Western societies in the modern era freedom is central to white racial identity and that whiteness is an essential component of freedom. To be free is to be white, and to be white is to be free. The book explores how societies based on liberty, like the French and American republics, could without contradiction also practice racism against peoples of color because those who were not white by definition could not be free.
It also shows how the clarion call of liberty in these societies derived its force in part from its appeal to race.
 
CJP: Didn’t gender and class also play key roles in the social construction of freedom?
 
TS: Since those are not the primary subjects of this book my answer to this question is necessarily limited, but class and gender certainly also played an important role. One need only consider the history of voting as a political right in the modern era. In many Western democracies the franchise was only gradually granted to people without property, and until the twentieth century it was almost universally reserved for men. The right to property, a key component of freedom in capitalist societies, was also highly gendered, and more generally if one did not have property (the case of most working people in the modern era) one could not truly be free.
 
CJP: Isn’t it also the case that freedom has always meant something different to conservatives and progressives?
 
TS: To a certain extent, yes: conservatives have traditionally focused on individual liberty and negative ideas of freedom, freedom from, whereas progressives have tended to emphasize the freedom of groups from oppression based on class, race, gender, and other identities. I would say, however, that in many ways the conservative, individualistic interpretation of freedom has been dominant during the modern era, and that conservatives are more likely than progressives to foreground ideas of freedom in their politics. Many progressives give greater importance to equality than freedom, for example. Also, if you consider the very idea of liberal democracy, which I consider a kind of compromise between these two approaches, conservatives stress liberalism and progressives stress democracy.
 
CJP: Racism not only remains a major problem in American society, but race relations seem to have gotten worse over the last few years. In fact, we have seen the return of white supremacy in U.S. politics during Donald Trump’s reign of rage and destruction. What’s your explanation for this unsettling socio-political development which threatens the very fabric of American democracy?
 
TS: I’m not sure I agree with the basic premise of this question, because I don’t think that white supremacy ever went anywhere, and I don’t think it’s necessarily worse now than in the past. For example, what strikes me most about the Black Lives Matter movement is how many whites support it, in a way that would have been hard to imagine ten years ago. That said, there certainly remains lots of racism in American society, and I think it is due to the combination of two factors.
First, American society and culture are growing more multicultural and diverse, and second the living standards of many Americans, including working class whites, have declined significantly since the 1970s. Traditionally in American society lower class whites who had very little property or social status could take comfort in their whiteness and white privilege, but now that seems to many to be increasingly jeopardized. Those whites who invaded the Capitol building on January 6, 2001 felt that their communities and their futures were threatened by the new contours of American life, and as we have seen in such situations people react violently.

 
CJP: Given the thesis of your book, namely, that racism and freedom are intertwined in the western political tradition, isn’t there a need therefore to redefine freedom?
 
TS: I would say rather that it is important to reinforce universal ideas of freedom that have also existed in the West, and bolster their rejection of white freedom. For example, in my book I discuss the ways in which the Statue of Liberty has been an icon of white freedom, symbolizing the ability of European immigrants to achieve white privilege in America. My preferred solution to that would not be to take down Lady Liberty, but rather to underscore other kinds of liberty. The Statue of Liberty and the myths around it tend to obscure the fact that New York was one of America’s great slave ports, so why not have another statue in New York harbor that commemorates slave rebellions in New York as symbols of liberty? Many people in America and throughout the world have rejected white freedom and fought for liberty for all, and it’s important to honor their struggles.
 
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White Freedom: An Interview With Tyler Stovall. By C.J. Polychroniou. Rozenberg Quarterly , January 2021.
 

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: 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.
 
The History of Freedom Is a History of Whiteness.  By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. The Nation, March 17, 2021.

1.

 
Two events in recent history:
 
In April and May of 2020, a series of demonstrations took place inside and around the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan. Demonstrators gathered in protest of recent stay-at-home orders by Governor Gretchen Whitmer intended to help slow the spread of the coronavirus. The orders closed theaters, bars, gyms, and salons. It limited restaurants to carry out. The crowd was largely white and more than a few were armed — a number of protestors carried assault rifles slung across their chests. Outside the Capitol, protestors carried signs that read “Give Me Govt. Distancing,” and “Tyrants Get The Rope.” Inside, demonstrators tried to force their way into the legislative chamber chanting “Our house,” and “Let us in.” These chants were made in the face and against the bodies of the Michigan State Police who, without reverting to force, kept the protestors at bay. One group, Michigan United for Liberty, called the moment “judgment day.”
 
Starting two weeks after the demonstrations in Michigan and running throughout the summer, a series of protests under the banner Black Lives Matter happened across the country. The first of these in Minneapolis, Minnesota in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands, or knee, of the Minneapolis Police Department. The protests against racism, police brutality, and for racial justice, spread from city to city as organizers rallied and communities took up the BLM mantle. While these protests were, for the most part, peaceful, some rioting and destruction of property did occur (although by whom and to what extent local and federal forces of authority instigated and provoked demonstrators is an ongoing discussion). Unlike the protests in Michigan, where police provided passive protection for the lawmakers inside the Capitol, cops met BLM protestors while wearing full riot gear. They tear-gassed people by order of the justice department, physically assaulted them, detained them by unidentified federal officers, and committed other egregious human rights violations.
 
Of the protests in Michigan, outgoing President Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”; in reference to Black Lives Matter, he called the phrase a “symbol of hate.”
 
Both protests were about liberty, freedom. One, the freedom to get a haircut, go to the movies or out to eat or to the gym. These protestors were seeking freedom from government interference into their everyday lives: they would not be told what to do, pandemic be damned. The other was a protest for freedom of racial equality, the freedom against the destruction of Black bodies, the freedom to not fear for one’s life because of the color of one’s skin.
 
These two examples of protests are not false equivalencies. And the reactions to them highlight what kinds of freedom we as an American society value. We are apt to give credence to freedom of capital (haircuts and movies) over that of Black bodies asking to breathe. At the same time we are acknowledging what we find grievable and who we find non-grievable.  The white protestors we call “patriots”; those protesting for Black lives we call “thugs.”
 
2.
 
These protests and their disparate receptions are examples of how the ideas (constructs) of freedom and race are intertwined in function and development. This idea is at the heart of Tyler Stovall’s sprawling yet focused White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea. Stovall explores the histories of freedom and racism in France and the United States — two nations that have taken liberty as the center of their identities. He challenges the common misconception that racism and slavery were paradoxical to freedom and the liberal democratic tradition, and shows how white identity is intrinsic to what we in the West identify as liberty. Freedom is anything but colorblind, and when we talk about freedom throughout the history of Western liberal democracy, we are talking about white freedom.
 
White Freedom is clear and engaging. It offers fresh insight to the idea of liberty — an idea that is increasingly at the fore of societal concern. Stovall doesn’t preach; he doesn’t try to convince anyone to come to his side. He offers important context to the history of the development of freedom, and engaging analysis supported by carefully researched evidence. Stovall, a professor of history and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Fordham University, gives us all the information we need, and then challenges us to look deeper.
 
As Stovall takes readers through the history of white freedom, one of the more fascinating connections he makes is one to piracy. Stovall notes, “Piracy has represented a rejection of the integrity and laws of the liberal nation-state, while at the same time often symbolizing a romantic idea of freedom.” The work to tamp down the first, gave rise to the second leading to the romanticized notion of pirates (read: Disney and Johnny Depp) we still hold today. The golden age of piracy “symbolized an exotic, untamed world, one in which fantasy and reality still coexisted.”
 
Piracy’s greatest offense is its crime against property. Liberal freedom sees the rule of law and the right to private property as paramount to the ideas of liberty. Pirates opposed both of these. Put this together with the fact that many enslaved became pirates, and that pirates often took part in political struggles for liberty — slaves were considered property — and you can see how piracy was “the kind of savage liberty white freedom must ultimately destroy.”
 
The Statue of Liberty is another oft romanticized icon of liberty. Conceived by Édouard de Laboulaye after France had overthrown the Second Empire and once again became a republic (although a more moderate one that some would have preferred) and after the US Civil War that saw the end of slavery as an institution, the Statue of Liberty was meant to be a straightforward representation of freedom and form “an alliance of the two great sister republics, one that would bring liberty and enlightenment to all the people of the world.”
 
Stovall goes on to explain how the Statue of Liberty came to be one of the world’s great racial icons, “a symbol of whiteness.” Its European features, and absence of any identifying marks that could link it to rebels or freed slaves made it a strong signifier of white identity. Later the statue would play a large role in allowing European immigrants to the US to claim whiteness as a label.
 
3.
 
In many ways, we are still reckoning with the Enlightenment. We can recognize Immanuel Kant’s brilliance in epistemology and metaethics, but we must also recognize his profound racism. Kant ranked Black people at the bottom of his racial categorization. Even though many Enlightenment thinkers advocated for more egalitarian treatment of Black people and other people of color, few believed they could govern themselves. Kant, like others, placed a great importance on education, and he believed Black people could not be educated and therefore could not handle (and did not deserve) freedom.
 

One Enlightenment thinker Stovall includes in his history is the Marquis de Condorcet. Condorcet was a vocal opponent of African slavery, taking on and dismantling pro-slavery arguments. But even he opposed immediate abolition of slaves. Condorcet believed that Black people would only be free “when they merged with and disappeared into the white population through miscegenation.” This Enlightenment idea of freedom belonging to the white races was a clear influence on the signers of the Declaration of Independence and other founding fathers.
 
Unlike France, the United States was founded as a slave republic. The birth of the United States was celebrated by Enlightenment thinkers. Denis Diderot congratulated the revolutionaries for “having buried their chains and reject[ing] their enslavement by the British.” The slave metaphor was a favorite during the Enlightenment. Supporters of American independence railed against being slaves to the British, but, as Stovall points out, ignored the enslaved people in actual chains. George Washington, a slave owner, advocating for rebellion warned that the lands of America would either “be drenched in Blood, or inhabited by Slaves.” Thomas Jefferson owned more than one hundred slaves when he was drafting the Declaration of Independence.
 
One of the major tipping points for the American colonies was the fear (largely unfounded) that the British government would seek to limit the colonies’ interest in keeping slaves. The Somerset Decision freed a slave who was brought to England from Virginia. The petition to free James Somerset cited the Freedom Principle: Britain was free land, and therefore Somerset could not be held as a slave. To the American colonies the implication was if they wanted to keep slavery in place, “they would have to seek their own liberation from Britain.”
 
White Freedom is an historical analysis; it is not a polemic — Stovall has no obligation to provide a blueprint for a way forward. The last third of White Freedom deals with the Western world of World War II and beyond — the ironies of America battling extreme bigotry of the Nazis, and fighting for liberty and equality of peoples “enslaved” through communism, while segregation was still rampant within its own borders.
 
The Civil Rights era seemed to usher in a second reconstruction, further weakening white freedom. However, with encouragement from intellectuals of the New Right, the overt language and explicit racism receded (for the time), making way for micro aggressions and coding: attacking busing was, in reality, white parents attacking a Black body learning next to that of their child’s.
 
These fingerprints are all over the way white freedom expresses itself today. You can see them on the Michigan protests, the Proud Boys strutting, armed, through the streets; or in the responses of “All lives matter,” when Black deaths are protested. White freedom was on full display when Mr. Trump challenged votes cast in cities like Detroit and Atlanta — cities with large Black populations. At a Georgia rally Mr. Trump made claims of cheating and supporters held signs that read “Save America.” The implications were clear: Black votes should not be counted because these people do not count; they aren’t capable of making the “correct” decision.
 
Perhaps the best way to read Stovall’s history is to use the book as an object through which to examine our own experiences of liberty. White Freedom has much to tell us, if we let it, about how racism has been built into so many of our systems and institutions, and about how what we see as freedom isn’t really freedom for all.
 
American Racism, American Reckoning in “White Freedom”. By Brock Kingsley. Chicago Review of Books, January 19, 2021.
 

Give us liberty and give them death,” said David Duke at a rally for the Ku Klux Klan in Baton Rouge, La., in 1975. His thunderous words were a play on the famous quotation from Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Henry’s statement was intended to express his commitment to the well-known American ideal of freedom, which he and his peers took to be at stake in their forthcoming revolutionary struggle with the British Empire. But when Duke gave this speech as the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he had in mind another ideal with deep roots in American history: racial domination.

 
The two men could hardly have more different legacies. Henry is venerated as a “founding father,” while Duke is reviled as a disgraceful bigot. But any attempt to delegitimize Duke’s appropriation of Henry’s words and the ideal they represent must also contend with an uncomfortable and inconvenient truth: The freedom that Henry, a plantation and slave owner, and his fellow founders took to be worth defending was also linked to the racial domination that organized life and labor in the American colonies. The revolution was a struggle for self-rule, but it also sought this self-rule in order to control the land conquered from Native Americans and the labor extorted from abducted Africans. It was a politics of freedom entwined, from the outset, with a politics of enslavement and exploitation.
 
Tyler Stovall’s new book, White Freedom, attempts to answer the questions raised by this juxtaposition of Duke and Henry. How, he asks, can we square the “acme of Western civilization,” the ideal of liberty celebrated in the US and French republics, with its “nadir,” that of racial slavery, colonialism, and genocide? In plainer terms, “How is it,” as the English writer Samuel Johnson sardonically asked in 1775, the same year as Henry’s address, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of [enslaved] negroes?”
 
Through painstaking and comprehensive historical research, Stovall addresses these questions by means of the concept named in his book’s title: white freedom. For centuries, he argues, writers, intellectuals, and politicians have tried various strategies to reconcile the United States’ and France’s brutal histories of racial domination, settler conquest, and slavery with their stated commitments to freedom. Many of these strategies have hinged on an attempt to use one to explain away the other. Those who defend the historical legacies of both countries insist that liberty is their true moral foundation; racism, colonialism, and slavery were transitory imperfections that the march of “progress” eventually brought to an end. Those who view them as irredeemable often contend the reverse: that racism is, as Stovall puts it, the “true inescapable reality of Western culture and society.” But as he demonstrates, at the heart of the two nations were both a commitment to liberty and a vision of society in which this liberty was unequally distributed and deeply racialized. The result was freedom for those at the top of the racial hierarchy, supported by and premised upon the unfreedom of those at the bottom.
 
According to Stovall, then, the dueling realities of freedom and slavery, liberty and domination, master and slave, are not just a clash of opposites; instead, they have been and continue to be counterparts in the making of modern history. To be free, Stovall notes, has long meant to be white, and to be white has conversely long meant to be free.
 
To explain the symbiotic relationship between racism and freedom, Stovall begins by charting the history of liberty and domination in modern North Atlantic history. His first chapter recounts the fascinating history of piracy, particularly in the Caribbean, including how the French and US republics sought to restrict the practice. Among the Caribbean pirates—many of whom had formerly been enslaved—a “rough racial democracy” prevailed. Electing and removing their captains by the principle of “one man, one vote,” many of the pirate outfits were in fact more democratic than the republics from which they stole. But the pirates’ self-government and their freedom at sea also threatened French and US sovereignty: They attacked shipping lanes key to transatlantic commerce; they made coastal territories vulnerable; and their sense of democratic equality posed a challenge to the republics’ racial hierarchies both at home and abroad. For the US and French republics to ensure their reigns, the pirates and their “savage freedom” had to be eliminated.
 
The drive to develop navies and eliminate piracy on the high seas also came home to roost. Much as the United States and France sought to suppress the pirates, Stovall contends, they sought to dominate and control the children in their own countries, and they did so in the name of a new form of freedom: one defined not by bucking formal power structures (as the pirates did) but by respecting them. Resistant to authoritarian control, the teenager and the pirate alike needed to be introduced to new forms of discipline—systems of domination that American and French society insisted enabled new forms of liberty.
 
Out of this new definition of freedom also came, Stovall notes, a racialization of those deemed not worthy to receive it. On the one hand was a freedom defined by savagery and subalterns; on the other was a set of natural liberties and rights owed only to adult white Europeans, whether they lived in America or in Europe. As colonization and the Atlantic slave trade both expanded, they became even more integral to justifying the regimes of domination and violence erected by those republics in the pursuit of freedom.
 

This new notion of freedom was not only racialized but gendered and then also domesticated. While the French revolutionary symbol known as Marianne is famously depicted in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People as a bare-chested woman wielding a musket and bayonet in the violence against the old regime, her descendant the Statue of Liberty—given to the United States by France—offers a contrasting depiction of liberty: a serene, robed woman holding a torch rather than a weapon. Freedom, yes, Lady Liberty tells us, but a pacified form of it.
 
Stovall then turns to the way this new domesticated and racialized mode of freedom fit into the peculiar double movement of world politics over the 18th and 19th centuries. While liberal democracy and expanded social freedoms began to extend throughout the domestic spheres of American and European republics like the United States and France, these same powers expanded their authoritarian colonial control over much of the rest of the world.
 
How could these nations reconcile their valorization of self-government with their actual practices of slavery and colonialism—the ultimate forms of government by others? This is where Stovall’s earlier story about how freedom became racialized in the 18th and 19th centuries intersects with his story about how freedom became the province of the few and not the many. Racism helped square the circle: The right and privilege of self-government was linked to what was perceived as Europeans’ unique capacity for rational thought. As John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty, the doctrine of liberty ought to apply only to “human beings in the maturity of their faculties.” “Despotism,” on the other hand, was “a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.”
 
In France, the tensions between the new republic’s commitment to freedom and its actual violence and domination were well represented by the Marquis de Condorcet. The fiery French radical was one of slavery’s most vociferous European foes, yet he also opposed the immediate emancipation of the enslaved. As with the American founding fathers, slavery as a metaphor for unfreedom was a clear and present evil, but on the actual social institution that structured the lives of Africans throughout the French Empire, Condorcet and his fellow abolitionists demanded a bit of nuance. The Society for the Friends of the Blacks, of which he was a member, attempted to get the National Assembly to pass a motion to end French participation in the slave trade, but it stopped short of an attempt to end the slave trade itself. Stovall reports that Condorcet also insisted that enslaved Black people were unprepared for emancipation and that he ultimately “foresaw freedom coming to blacks when they merged with and disappeared into the white population through miscegenation.”
 
Condorcet and the French radicals were not alone. Most of the Enlightenment’s intellectuals, from Immanuel Kant to the physician François Bernier, offered elaborate theories that affirmed the right to freedom for white Europeans while simultaneously producing cutting-edge racial science. Kant, for instance, wrote that there was only one innate right, “freedom,” which meant “independence from being constrained by another’s choice.” Yet he also wrote approvingly of a critique of a proposal to free Black slaves, since they lacked the mental capacity to be good laborers without being coerced into activity. Likewise, he regarded Native people in North America as “incapable of any culture” and “far below even the Negro” in their adaptability and strength. The embrace of freedom and the embrace of racism were complementary positions, not contradictory ones: The case for freedom for Europeans was also the case for unfreedom for the rest of the world.
 

In the United States, Thomas Jefferson perhaps best embodied this vision of freedom, even if there were many other contenders, such as Patrick Henry. In 1776, Jefferson famously wrote the Declaration of Independence, which held that “all men are created equal” and endowed with an inalienable right to liberty, even though he owned more than 600 human beings—surely some sort of conflict, should we take his words literally. He also wrote, in 1781, Notes on the State of Virginia, which held that Black Americans—free or enslaved—should be “removed beyond the reach of mixture.” “It is not against experience to suppose,” Jefferson argued, “that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”
 
Whether in Condorcet’s France or Jefferson’s America, racism served—rather transparently—to justify those political institutions that were sharply and clearly opposed to the letter of the principles being invoked to legitimate them. By naturalizing European superiority, Stovall shows, Jefferson, Condorcet, and other thinkers could justify a system of freedom for some while complacently accepting the domination of many others—and the “white” in white freedom was society’s way of organizing who played which role.
 
Some may argue that the examples of Jefferson, Condorcet, and the rest imply that racial domination boils down to errors in thinking about race and justice, or that white freedom is merely an inconsistency in reasoning from abstract ideals and principles to concrete political questions. But what drove the formation of republican freedom and its racialized forms of enslavement and colonization was material more than ideational. These thinkers were explaining an economic, political, and military stratification of society that already existed and that had not waited for such justifications. After all, by the time they were writing, the European empires had been amassing wealth through enslaved labor for several generations. These men were offering highbrow justifications of this system of exploitation only to make it palatable to polite society. As Aimé Césaire explained in his classic “Discourse on Colonialism,” killing and plunder tend to come first and the “slavering apologists” later. The conquistadors spent vastly more effort “justifying” themselves with sword and bullet; putting a flattering rhetorical cloak on naked plunder was a pressing concern only for later generations.
 
Despite Stovall’s focus on cultural and intellectual history, this primacy of violent domination proves to be a central theme in White Freedom, and in his final chapters he pays close attention to how the West’s pursuit of political power and profits has proved more historically decisive than the doctrines of liberty and racism that its intellectuals devised to justify this pursuit. Britain and France saw World War I, for example, not as a struggle to end imperial domination but as an opportunity to expand it—so long as they were the ones doing the dominating. In the midst of fierce battles in France and what is now Iraq, they signed the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement to divide the Ottoman Empire between them at the war’s end. This did not stop many nations from seeking to free themselves from this domination after the war, as national liberation struggles and revolts erupted from India to Ireland. Nevertheless, the conclusion of World War I marked a return to a politics that saw freedom as an ideal for some but not all. In 1919, in the Punjabi town of Amritsar, British colonial troops raked protesters with machine gun fire, killing hundreds, rather than allow a demonstration against their rule. In Korea, millions of people organized against Japanese colonialism, prompting a similarly violent response that claimed thousands of lives, while in France, the government resorted to the mass deportation of “exotic” Chinese laborers from its colonies throughout the Caribbean and Africa, replacing them with workers from southern and eastern Europe. During the same year in the United States, there was widespread racial violence and terrorism, especially against returning Black veterans, who were more assertive of their right to self-rule than white freedom could countenance. The summer after the war’s conclusion was known in the United States as the Red Summer for its massive wave of violence nationwide, as white mobs looked to restore the racial order.
 
For Stovall, this march of white freedom continued into World War II and the Cold War years. Nazi Germany sought to expand its empire while also racially purifying its society at home, and it did so under the banner of freedom for the German Volk—providing one of the book’s most powerful and persuasive demonstrations of the complementary relationship between freedom and race.
 
Looking to the model of racial domination developed by the United States, the Third Reich passed the Nuremberg Laws, which installed racialized tiers of legal protections, stripping German Jews of their citizenship and barring sex and marriage between “Germans” and “non-Germans.” This program of racialization and marginalization eventually culminated in the death camps—which also drew on techniques of genocide the German Empire had used in Namibia—where millions of Europe’s Jews, a half million of its Romani, and others targeted for their sexual or gender identity or physical or mental disabilities perished. In this way, the Nazis brought home to Europe the violence and racial subjugation that the European powers had practiced in their colonies, in what Hannah Arendt called the “boomerang effect” of imperialism.
 
The defeat of the Third Reich represented a powerful blow to this nakedly racist and authoritarian conception of white freedom. As Stovall shows, however, the postwar consensus that arose out of the Allies’ victory posed another challenge to realizing a vision of freedom cut loose from racism. President Harry Truman presided over the ascendant nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which cast themselves as representatives of the “free world” against the “captive nations” of the Soviet sphere. But this program of freedom curiously failed to include the captive nations of the British and French empires—nations that, as Stovall points out, were not referred to as nations at all.
 
These captive nations, however, had their own conception of freedom and were willing to fight for it. Figures like Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere challenged the West’s continued embrace of racial domination with a demand for freedom from empire. This led, Stovall writes, to “one of the most dramatic series of events in modern world history,” as the number of member states of the United Nations swelled from 55 in 1946 to more than double that by 1965, the vast majority of them former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. World War II and its political aftermath challenged the idea of white freedom “to an unprecedented degree in modern history,” he concludes. A new conception of freedom, cut loose from its racialized origins, began to proliferate, even if it remained threatened by both the former imperial powers of Europe and the ascendant one in the United States.
 

While the concept of white freedom is Stovall’s, the subject of how freedom and race are entwined is not new. Carole Pateman’s insightful analysis of the gender domination inherent to the liberal social compact in The Sexual Contract inspired a similar analysis by Charles Mills in his 1994 book The Racial Contract, which considered how the social compact that safeguards liberal freedoms is also composed of several other compacts that protect the freedom of white people to dominate and exploit the nonwhite peoples of the world. Radical political theorists like Neville Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Oliver Cox made their own cases for how liberal freedom had become racialized, insisting that, contrary to what many claim, the social structure and political ideals of liberal democracies can coexist with racial domination.
 
Outside the academy, the critical notion of white freedom has influenced much of the Black activism of the past century to the present day. Ida B. Wells, for instance, outlined many of the same connections between freedom and race. In her turn-of-the-century speech “Lynch Law in America,” she rejected a description of lynching as the “sudden outburst” of an “insane mob,” characterizing it instead as “the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an ‘unwritten law,’” above and beyond the written law, that allows and even demands violence against Black and Indigenous people, while reserving the freedom-preserving written law for whites.
 
Half a century later, Aimé Césaire and an ascendant generation of anticolonial activists leveled similar accusations at the French Empire and the broader constellation of Western powers that enabled it, with Césaire writing that the “great thing” he held against such “pseudo-humanism” is that its very concept of human rights is “sordidly racist.”
 
While Stovall’s account of freedom and race is a compelling one, he might have done more with this deeper critical tradition, if only because so many of its advocates put forth visions of a freedom liberated from the shackles of racism. For example, along with the Caribbean pirates and France’s Marianne, he might have considered how maroon society and the liberated colonies offered alternative conceptions of emancipation. While Stovall provides a thoughtful answer to the question “What does it mean for freedom to be white?,” the reader may also want one to the question “What does it mean for freedom not to be white?”
 
Nonetheless, White Freedom’s strengths resonate far more than its weaknesses. The book is a treasure trove of historical detail, but it’s also written clearly and persuasively, such that the overarching themes of race and freedom consistently ring louder than the minutiae. Its focus also helps Stovall to provide a coherent narrative about a political history of multiple countries spanning multiple centuries. His history of American and French racial politics outside of their domestic sphere is commendable, making these empires accountable for their total domains of control and influence, including their oft-ignored colonial endeavors and effects on global politics.
 
White Freedom is also a worthy addition to the recent surge of work rethinking the connection between race and other fundamental aspects of our social system, from the discussions of The New York Times’ 1619 Project and critical race theory to leftist debates about racial capitalism. The recent global protests against racism and police violence suggest that these issues may continue to powerfully shape politics for quite some time.
 
Stovall concludes with a juxtaposition of two US presidents: Ronald Reagan, who demanded in 1987 that the Berlin Wall be torn down in the interest of freedom, and Donald Trump, who demanded—along with the House Freedom Caucus—that the United States build a wall along its border with Mexico. In both cases, “freedom” represented a specific vision: a social order dominated by the United States. Reagan’s speech called for the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the rise of a new world order of unregulated capitalism upon which white freedom was built. In the ensuing era of unchallenged capitalism, Trump sought to build a wall that would free Americans from the burden of sharing their zones of wealth and domination with the Global South.
 
White freedom, Stovall reminds us, has a history, but it is no mere historical idea: Its defenders inherit a balance of power and the political advantages that centuries of white freedom have helped shape. But we inheritors of a different legacy—the efforts of those who forced white freedom into key retreats over the past centuries, thereby increasing the political freedoms of most of the people on this planet—are also alive and well. As the late Nipsey Hussle once said, “You build walls, we gon prolly dig holes.”
 
Liberty for Whom? By Olúfémi O. Táíwò. The Nation, May  3, 2021.