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.