Vital Interests: Tyler, thanks for joining us today on the Vital Interests forum. We will be discussing your book White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea which was recently published by Princeton University Press. 

In your book you start by examining freedom and slavery in the modern history of Western Europe with ideas emanating from the Enlightenment. Perhaps you could go back a bit further in Western history and look at how ideas about freedom and bondage labor evolved at the end of the feudal era. People were tied to the land for generations with no hope of freedom from their circumstances. Being forced into slavery was a widely practiced consequence of being on the wrong side of a war. 

As European feudal social structures broke apart due to pressure from developing trade and market economies, the prospect of a life free from bondage and slavery became possible. Can you tie this development to the evolution of modern concepts of freedom?

Tyler Stovall: Certainly, one of the things I would throw into the mix, especially in Europe, both Western and Eastern Europe, is the prevalence of serfdom. In many ways, the rise of freedom involved the suppression of the practice of slavery from Europe. It also involved the suppression of serfdom, freeing people from the land, freeing people to become independent agents of their own labor and also of capital, their ability to develop their own land as they saw fit.

This was something that was a very long-standing process. Russia didn't free the serfs until the 1860s, for example. The idea that people are tied to the land lasted for a long time. Let me just talk more generally about the idea of the rise of freedom. In this period, one of the things that was really I think important to the rise of freedom was urbanization. There's the old German saying that city air makes you free.

At least at the time, I think the idea was that if you could free yourself from the land,  you could get into a town or a city and there become a free agent. You could find work in the enterprises that were growing due to industrialization. You could join a guild and learn a trade. You could negotiate for your own wages. All this was a way of achieving freedom. I think that was in many ways more important than the idea that we associate freedom with in the modern era, which is freedom as granted by the state, as granted by the government, or as won from the government, was freedom to choose your own form of who rules over your life. Even more important was the idea of freedom to work for whom you wanted, and under the conditions that you wanted.

That, of course, becomes also important in the modern era, but it's in many ways associated with some different movements. For example, the whole development of trade unions, in many ways becomes a movement for freedom of one's own labor power. That's also then associated with a movement against slavery. The idea that you could work for whom you want under the conditions that you want, not working for somebody else, not being bound to somebody.

What interested me was to understand why freedom is so important and why freedom is so universally seen as positive in the modern era? If you think about it, there are ways in which freedom could also be seen as a negative. Freedom is a license for anarchy, for advocating for the lack of rules. For example, the idea of the libertine, especially the sexual libertine, somebody whose freedom is really destructive.

One of the things I find interesting is the history of freedom and childhood. In the modern era, you're supposed to be training children to become free adults, but you're doing so by controlling them as closely as possible. In some ways, actually, in the modern era it seems children are becoming less free than they were in say the Middle Ages.

There is the fact, for example, that children have to go to school, which is seen as a major advance in the development of children. Of course, it also means children are told what to do and where to go. The idea is that only when they become mature adults do they have the right to be free. Which I think says important things about my notion of freedom, that freedom is not just doing whatever you want, freedom has to be tied to certain social behaviors and certain social understandings.

VI: When you discuss the significance of the end of serfdom, aren’t you talking about freedom from oppression? Individuals were free to seek work, to move somewhere else, to learn a trade. So the idea of individual freedom was tied to being safe from oppression, isn’t that right? Of course, this freedom from oppression was often qualified, as states denied rights, and in the case of slavery, as any notion of individual freedom was absent. 

Tyler Stovall: Yes, absolutely. The fact that you could have societies which increasingly saw themselves as free and at the same time practicing slavery is seen as a major paradox. I opened my book with quotations from the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, both are great symbols of two of the world's great movements for freedom, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. I make the point that many of the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence were slave owners.

The country that wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man - France - owned the most profitable slave colony in world history, Saint-Domingue, now contemporary Haiti. That they believed so vitally in freedom did not stop them from practicing slavery at the same time. In writing White Freedom, I wanted to talk about how that could be, why was that the case? The conclusion I came up with was that people did not see a contradiction between freedom and slavery as long as freedom and slavery were racially based. As long as there's white freedom and black slavery, then there was no contradiction.

VI: This slavery in question was the consequence of the transatlantic African slave trade that brought a large number of Black Africans to the Caribbean and the southern American colonies.  Wasn’t this a major phenomenon in modern social history - this transportation of entire populations of people from Africa to new lands in the Americas?

Tyler Stovall: Indeed it was. It was definitive in a way that previous population relocations had not been. There had been other major population movements, for example, movements across different parts of Europe, movements throughout Asia, but this was undertaken first by traders, and ultimately, by traders with the permission of nation-states. The Atlantic slave trade was organized to be really definitive so that the people who were brought to the New World as slaves were completely cut off from their backgrounds in Africa. The captivity of Black African slaves was designed so that they had no past or future. 

Deliberately so, to the point of having to learn new languages, having to develop new languages, and being cut off from all of their links to their previous histories and cultural influences. I can remember when Alex Haley wrote Roots and what a big deal it was that somebody who was of African American background would actually find links to his African ancestry. Now, of course, that we have ancestry.com, it's a bit more common.

It's interesting because one of the things you could note in terms of this African American culture is a tradition of huge family gatherings, of people staging these gatherings that involve all the members of their family for generations and generations. People could do that because there's this basic idea that all the members of their family are in the United States, that they don't really have ties to kinship in Africa or elsewhere.

VI: From the 16th to the 19th century the Atlantic slave trade was responsible for bringing over 10 million enslaved Black Africans to the Americas. This massive business in human suffering and oppression coincided with the evolution of modern ideas about liberty, freedom, and the natural rights of all individuals. How can this be explained?

Tyler Stovall: I think the whole language of paradox in many ways is very attractive, but it seems to me that ultimately, the whole idea of paradox only goes so far. If you have two things happening at the same time, it can't be completely contradictory if it's going on for centuries. There must be something underlying that brings them together, that brings these two concepts together.

That's why I thought there has to be something that says, okay, there are ways in which you define freedom in certain terms that in this case are racial terms. For example, I mentioned childhood earlier, nobody sees it as a paradox that children are forced to go to school to be taught to be free because that's what children are supposed to do. It's not paradoxical that they're not able to live as free because they do not have the emotional and mental wherewithal to do that.

VI: To be accepted in a society you need to be able to understand its rules and abide by them then?

Tyler Stovall: That's right, but the basis of this is the belief that children can be socialized and that they can be trained to be free, that children can grow up and adopt “mature” adult sensibilities. But if you have people that are seen as coming from inferior races that are seen to be permanently childlike, then you have an attitude that these races cannot grow up, that they cannot achieve this standard of maturation, and therefore they can never achieve this kind of freedom because it's not in their DNA, it's not part of their physical makeup or emotional mental capabilities. They have to be unfree because they do not have the ability to develop the wherewithal to be free individuals and function according to societal norms.

VI: Did this notion that children need to be socialized, to be trained so that they earn their freedom in a civilized society provide the necessary rationale that the uncivilized and inferior people of the African continent could be enslaved because they would never be capable of being equal, free individuals like White Europeans? Is this where we see the introduction of concepts of white freedom?

Tyler Stovall: I think so. A lot of this sentiment happens over different times in different places. Certainly, if you speak about the United States, or what became the United States in the late 18th century, the American colonies, and also if you speak about parts of Western Europe, notably France and other places as well, they're increasingly in touch with the world and coming into contact with people who are different, whose distinctiveness includes racial distinctions. This exposure becomes a foundation for the whole idea that being white is associated with being free. If you're going to come up with themes or ideas that symbolize the unity of white peoples in the United States and in Europe, freedom is going to be a central aspect of that.

It's interesting in terms of how it intersects with the history of the colonies. I often surprise my students when I tell them that one of the reasons why European countries expanded and developed colonial empires in the 19th century was precisely to stamp out the slave trade. They believed that the slave trade was evil. Therefore, you had to go upriver and wipe out the bases and the interior of these countries to stamp it out. On the one hand, there was this idea that you were going to make people free, but on the other hand, in order to make them free, you had to establish control over them.

Over time, European imperial leaders basically concluded that these people really couldn't become free after all. In France, for example, there was a whole shift from the idea of assimilation, which is they basically were going to turn all the natives into French men and women, to that of association which said, people have different cultures, they develop at different rates and you really can't expect them to become enamored of freedom in the same way that white French people are.

VI: Were scientific methods called upon to back-up these conclusions? The Enlightenment introduced early forms of anthropology where you could use modern scientific methodology to study and define what constituted a civilized person.

Tyler Stovall: Yes, absolutely. This was a major contribution of the Enlightenment. It is interesting because in many ways it was ultimately a Christian idea, the whole idea of the great chain of being expressed in terms of hierarchies of peoples.

Different scholars had different approaches, but if you look at the ideas they came up with, inevitably, you had White Europeans at the top of the hierarchy and Black Africans at the bottom, and then different other groups were placed at different levels in between. It really reinforced this idea of basically White superiority, White supremacy, and Black inferiority, which even if you tried to use that to criticize the slave trade - and many people did, at the same time - it had this ultimate effect that justified it or furnished ammunition let's say for people who wanted to justify the slave trade or slavery to do so.

VI: In addition to notions of the inferiority of Black Africans, there was also a distinct element of fear of Blacks. Part of their being uncivilized was that they were prone to violence and needed to be forcibly controlled. The prevalent image was always Black slaves in chains. Remarkably going on at the same time as the French and the American Revolutions’ call for liberty and freedom, there was the great slave revolt led by Toussaint L'Ouverture in the French slave colony of Saint-Domingue. What impact did this attempt by Black slaves to win their freedom have?

Tyler Stovall: It's interesting because as an historian, one of my interests is to see how the history of the whole revolution in Saint-Domingue has been portrayed and changed over time. In many ways, the revolution of Saint-Domingue, the revolution against the French, was the ultimate symbol of the age of revolution. Where else did you have people that were so oppressed rise up? 

Also, Saint-Domingue was the most profitable colony the world had ever known with huge profits going almost entirely to France. Saint-Domingue was basically the Silicon Valley of the era. Both on that level, just the fact that it was a tremendous economic shift, and the fact that it was the ultimate symbol of the revolution of the oppressed, it should have been seen as the centerpiece of the age of revolution and yet it never has been. It has always been seen as this peripheral event that mostly devolved into terrorism and murder and oppression and did not resolve in freedom at all.

I love to tell my students that one of the great ironies of the revolution in Saint-Domingue was that the independent governments of Saint-Domingue had to, in effect, pay reparations to the French for the property that they expropriated. The property of the French meant the slaves themselves, their own bodies. Haiti continued to pay these reparations until 1947, which is just astonishing.

Put it this way: if the people revolting in Saint-Domingue were Swiss, if this was Switzerland rather than a Black slave colony, the world would probably look at this as a great example of a vaunted revolution and a fight for freedom from oppression.

VI: In the late 18th century, ideas about the meaning of freedom were actively debated and written about in France and in the American colonies. Foundational documents such as the Declaration of Independence expressed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for colonial Americans and the Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen promised liberté, égalité, fraternité for the French. Wasn’t the language used to define what they thought of as the idea of freedom understood to mean that those who could truly enjoy a citizen’s privilege of liberty was reserved for white men?

Tyler Stovall: Yes, that's right. It's very interesting because the most radical phase of the French Revolution was the one that actually recognized the independence of Haiti, the Haitian revolutionaries. It was also the movement by the government that made France the most democratic. They granted the right to participate in government to all French men, not French women at this time, but all French men.

There was a link between, on the one hand, increased democracy at home - the democracy of the sans-culottes, for example, the militants of the French Revolution - and the recognition of democracy and freedom in Saint-Domingue. Napoleon, of course, basically smashed or tried to smash both. He smashed the most radical phase of the revolution in France itself and he also tried, unsuccessfully, as it turned out, to reconquer Haiti for the French. There was a link between the two.

If you look at the United States, it's also interesting, there's a whole debate now about the American Revolution. What was the attitude of the American Revolution towards slavery? How can a land that saw itself as fighting for freedom be, at the same time, a society that ended up struggling for the preservation of slavery? I think it's a really fascinating debate because it shows that there were many differences between those supporting American independence. Some supported slavery, some did not.

I think it's also interesting to look at it from the perspective of the slaves themselves, to see what they thought about this whole movement. What they thought about this movement of independence for what was to become the United States. For some of the slaves, it was simply an opportunity for them. They saw that their masters were engaged in other things, there was an opportunity for them to try and seek their own freedom and flee the plantation.

The American Revolution was actually one of the greatest acts of slave revolt in American history, second only to that of the Civil War. You had many American slaves trying to flee their plantations and reach British lines because there was at least the idea that the British were going to free the slaves.

Now, whether the British did or not, was very uncertain then. There was no certain proof that this was actually going to happen. Think about it from their point of view. If you're a slave, what have you got to lose in many ways? Certainly, it's dangerous, but still, you might win the ultimate prize, which is freedom.

VI: Were slaves fleeing southern plantations trying to get to Canada or British possessions in the Caribbean, or to northern cities where they might find abolitionists who could offer protection and support?

Tyler Stovall: I think what they were trying to do was to find the British troops or British armies, British lines. Remember, much of the northern part of the American colonies was under British occupation for much of the war. New York City was, for example. It wasn't yet that you had to get all the way to Canada.

If you could just find a British detachment, you could hopefully join up with them and be declared free. There was also the possibility that they might be taken to Canada or even to Britain or ultimately, to Africa, which did happen to some of the former slaves. It's interesting because in discussing the American Revolution we talk about Crispus Attucks as a major hero.  For obvious reasons, we don't talk about American slaves who fought for the British, right? Yet from their own perspective, they were fighting for freedom.

VI: By the middle of the19th Century, Black slavery is well established in the American South. It supports a major agricultural economy of cash crops like cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, rice and indigo. It is the economic engine that is providing prosperity for a good number of Americans in the North as well as the South. Europeans also profited from trade in cotton for their new textile industries and in the luxuries of tobacco and sugar.

When the Civil War started it was supported by Northern abolitionists as well as by sympathetic Europeans who wanted to see the end of slavery in the United States and the Caribbean. Was this just a noble cause for them because slavery was deemed a moral evil or were these White movements truly accepting of full freedom and equality for former slaves?

Tyler Stovall: Yes, it was that. One of these emphasizes the fact that when the Civil War started, the position of the North was not initially to abolish slavery, far from it. They basically wanted to end the secession of the southern states. If they has been able to do that in the first year, slavery might well have persisted, But as the war went on, the movement for abolition gained momentum and the institution of slavery became more and more imperiled and ultimately no longer viable.

The Southern side itself maintained that it was fighting for independence from the dominance of the North, which had a larger population, had more developed industry, and were doing so with several million people in the heart of it who were fundamentally opposed to everything it was fighting for.

It was, in many ways, an untenable position, but it was a fascinating environment because you do have this instance where many White people in the United States were very much committed to abolishing slavery and do so ultimately. One of the stories my family likes to tell speaks to this. I grew up in Ohio, and not very far from the grave of General William Sherman. People used to tell the story of pilgrims coming from Georgia to visit his grave so they could spit on his grave. Those memories go way back and run very deep.

VI: Were there also other pivotal events like the Dred Scott decision that proved to be a major motivating factor where people in the North said, "We can't have a Supreme Court that is making these kinds of rulings. This national divide over slavery really has to end." 

Tyler Stovall: Absolutely, absolutely. Look at the attention to John Brown's movement -  when he was executed, church bells rang throughout New England in his honor. The United States had, by the time of the Civil War, come to a point where, simply, this was not going to work. As Lincoln put it, you just simply cannot have a nation half slave and half free.

I think you could say that during the Revolution, there was a hope that slavery was going to die out. Seen especially from the British perspective, that it was sort of a dying institution. But then you had the invention of the cotton gin, the revival of the cotton industry which is also fueled by the industrial revolution in Britain itself because one of the major reasons for the success of the slave economy in the United States was the huge market for cotton in Britain.

Both countries were implicated in this movement and yet, in spite of that, the politics of it, the racial politics of it, meant that a decision had to be made. Slavery was ended, and yet in some ways, it wasn't really. In some ways, it endured. At least it politically endured.

VI: Because of the Civil War, the 13th,14th, and 15th Amendments were passed to grant equal freedoms and rights to emancipated slaves. But soon after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the Jim Crow Era in the South began enforcing segregation and imposing measures to keep African Americans from voting.   

Was this the era in the US when an acknowledged idea of white freedom, based on an attitude of White superiority, became established? When people felt that there were white American values that would be threatened a Black minority that had access to the same freedoms as the White majority?

Tyler Stovall: One of the things I found really interesting and it's something I learned writing this book - something that requires me  to wind the clock back into the post-revolutionary era - was what happened to free Blacks in the North. most Northern states did end slavery, but at the same time, you had a gradual enfranchisement of the white male population in the early 19th century.

Certainly, by the Civil War, America had pretty much reached the point of universal manhood suffrage but it was universal white manhood suffrage. What I found really fascinating was at the same time, especially when the new states of what we now call the Midwest - Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and so on, - were becoming states, none of them allowed Blacks to vote.

VI: This was due to voting restrictions put in place by state laws?

Tyler Stovall: Because of state laws. Exactly. That, of course, is one of the things about the United States. It is a federal system of 50 states. Each state had different ideas about who was going to have the right to vote. Remember, for example, when women first got the right to vote, of course, was in individual states in the late 19th century. The same thing happened with African Americans, but you had this really interesting phenomenon; namely,  America was one of the leading nations in the world in terms of the ability of ordinary men to vote, but they had to be white men.  

VI: Let's jump back to 19th and 20th century France. France became a major colonial power with colonies in the Caribbean, throughout Asia, and in Africa, particularly in North Africa. To effectively administer their colonies, the French had to deal with diverse indigenous populations. There was a notion that French culture was based on universal principles of a modern civilized society that could be transferred to other lands and make colonial subjects French - at least to the extent that they would be sympathetic to French imperial rule. This, however, was not the reality?

Tyler Stovall: No, it wasn't and for a variety of reasons. One obvious problem with this approach was that if you believed that you could make people French by educating them in Frenchness, you had to create schools. The French invested very little money in colonial education. They basically invested just enough money so that the people they were educating would go to work for them and not much more than that.

It's interesting because to this day - and I know because I've talked with people who grew up in the French colonial or overseas schools - , even when those schools did work well and won incredible loyalty from the people that they served, very few of those schools were ever created. It really underscored the hypocrisy of this idea that you're going to train people to be French, but to do so requires a major investment in building colonial educational institutions.

There's one very interesting group with regard to this. There was basically a group of French Jews - it was called The Alliance Israélite Universelle, The Universal Jewish Alliance. This group in the 19th century argued that France had liberated the Jews, Napoleon had liberated the Jews of Europe. The way to get Jews, especially Jews in the Middle East and North Africa to embrace modern civilization, was to train them in French education.

This group created its own schools, privately funded for the Jews of North Africa and Turkey, for example, and they were really popular among these populations. It showed what you could do if you had the goodwill, if you had the real desire to do that, which this Universal Jewish Alliance did, but unfortunately, most of the French imperial regime did not have that.

VI: All they did really was create a small ruling elite that were aligned with the French colonial powers?

Tyler Stovall: That's right, and this elite was often very loyal to France, but they were a very small elite and this did not really help most of the population. There's the sense, which French education really emphasized, that being incredibly centralized and basically teaching people that they were African Frenchmen and women. People used to say that French schools were so centralized that at any given moment in the day, all the students in the same class were turning the exact same page in the exact same book, in countries around the world, and that was seen as a good thing.

VI: This was a different notion than the British idea of the white man's burden where you had to control colonial populations with strict colonial administrators backed up by military power.

Tyler Stovall: Right. It was the idea that you were going to win their souls basically, that in so doing you were going to expand your culture. In many ways it was based on the idea underlying Napoleon's conquest of Europe, the idea of expanding French institutions to different peoples of the world, Governance based on Napoleonic law, for example. If you look at that, for example, what many colonial subjects learned was that they wanted freedom just as the French taught was important, but they wanted freedom from the French. This ended up spawning major anti-French movements in the name of French ideals.

VI: The upheaval of the First World War led to the breakup of long-established colonial empires. In your book you write about the impact of Wilsonian ideas of freedom for nation-states emerging from colonial dominance based on the principle of self-determination. This ran into the wall of racial consciousness about whether former Black African colonies were ready to be free and capable of self-governance. Can you go into this distinction of who was worthy and capable of enjoying Western ideals of freedom?                              

Tyler Stovall: Yes. It was really interesting. The year 1919 sees the negotiations to end the First World War and create a peace treaty as one of the great moments in world history. It's probably the year in which the world really does first become conscious of itself as a unified community where you have people from throughout the planet coming to Paris to take part in the peace negotiations. You have representatives from many different colonial empires coming to demand freedom, to demand that the Wilsonian ideas of self-determination be applied to everybody.

What happens when all the dust settles by the end of the year, by the time the treaty is signed, is that you have a world where formal democracy and freedom has been extended basically to the white nations of the world. It’s a time of the collapse of empires in Europe and Eastern Europe in particular and the creation of independent states like Poland, like Yugoslavia, like Czechoslovakia, out of areas that were parts of empires before.

Africa, on the other hand, and much of Asia remained colonies. One of the most interesting examples is that of Ireland, which is always a fascinating example because in many ways, it was seen as the ultimate colony by the British. In many ways, the Irish were seen as basically non-whites in the 19th century, but Ireland did gain its independence finally in the aftermath of the First World War. You could say in some ways, that's part and parcel of it gradually becoming recognized as a white nation as well.

VI: These major world events accelerated the mixing of races and provided opportunities for Blacks to participate at a different level in societies, to be more integrated. In Europe people from former colonies looked to migrate to places like Paris where their common language presented them with economic opportunities. 

But then there were backlashes in the United States and Europe to non-whites seeking more freedom. You introduce into your narrative the extreme racial purity of fascism that was such a tragic part of the Second World War.

Tyler Stovall: Absolutely, yes. It's interesting because of course, if you look at Mussolini's in Italy and especially Hitler's Nazi Germany, for them, freedom is all about being part of the national project which they defined especially in Germany as a racial project.

You had to be a part of that, of what they felt was the German race, or else you could not be free. They really emphasized the destruction of the Jews and other non-German populations as part of the freedom of the race, as part of the race becoming free and becoming self-standing. They saw the existence of their own nation as part of a war for freedom that was a racial war against other people that were trying to sabotage their idea of national freedom.

You look at all the horrors of the Holocaust in particular, and you see to what extent this whole idea of freedom could be really destructive, could really emphasize destroying people that lay outside, what was seen as the national community.

The other important thing about the fascist era was just the tremendous counter-reaction that it provoked after the war was over - the universal repulsion to the horrors of Auschwitz. How could you possibly justify any regime that practices something like that? It caused a real reaction in world politics against the idea of racial politics, against racial determination, at least in theory, and led to an embrace of racial equality.

Now, to what extent that theory translated to actual practice is a whole other question, but it did cause that reaction. Of course, the other thing it did was cause a reaction among many people of color themselves. I said my grandfather fought in the First World War, my father fought in the Second World War - we can certainly find the roots of the Civil Rights Movement lay in Blacks fighting in foreign wars. Many of the people who led the struggle for equality were actually veterans of these wars and kept asking themselves the question, "Why should we fight overseas for freedom that we're not guaranteed at home?"

VI: This brings us to the civil rights era in America which was a deep social movement to confront Jim Crow laws designed to deny African Americans basic rights. There were marches, protests, and sit-ins demanding the end of segregation, restrictions on voting rights, and systemic discrimination. The chant was “Freedom Now” which meant Black Americans must have the full rights of citizenship and freedoms as white people. 

Tyler Stovall: Yes, and explicitly so. That all really changes in America over the course of basically a generation. I'm old enough to remember going into a movie theater and being politely told that the movie theater did not serve negroes.

This was just the way things were done. That changed, it changed fundamentally during the 1950s and the 1960s and it changed due to these popular movements, but it also changed because the basic explicit idea of why freedom was simply no longer acceptable for most Americans. You might think that, but you would no longer say that and you would no longer explicitly build policy on that. That was a fundamental change, but I'm also interested in the ways in which the whole idea of white freedom survived even that movement.

VI: At the same time that Civil Rights and Voter Right Acts were being passed, there was a well-defined backlash with the creation of ultra-right groups like the John Birch Society with an agenda aimed at undermining the basic democratic idea of one person, one vote. To counter the expansion of the franchise to non-whites, the idea was propagated that the United States was not founded as a democracy to be governed by popular vote, but rather as a republic where individual states determined who qualified to vote. Isn’t this still the tactic we see today to deny the vote to minority communities?

Tyler Stovall: Yes, it most certainly is. For example, I recently realized that if you look at the 10 smallest states in America, they have a combined total population that's less than that of Los Angeles County - and they elect 20 senators.

VI:  Let’s examine what constitutes this endurance of notions of White freedom, White power, White supremacy in the United States. There is another component that we have not discussed and that is the religious aspect. An additional label for those promoting white dominance is White Christian Nationalists. Although constitutionally there is supposed to be a separation of church and state in America, there has always been a predominant Christian influence on the laws and attitudes of this country. On the other hand, France has specifically declared itself to be a secular society where religion plays no role in governance. Can you talk about that comparison and how this impacts racial perceptions?

Tyler Stovall: Let's talk about France first because you're correct France does have this law expressing the secular nature of the French state. Part of this reality is this attitude, "We do not explicitly deal with issues of race or ethnicity at all. In France we do not recognize racial differences. We are also a secular nation." Yet, look at what that means for those French people of Islamic faith. It means that you can pass laws that are basically fundamentally anti-Islamic like the ban on headscarves. This would not be done to target Jews from wearing a yarmulke or Christians from displaying a cross.

This is defended by saying "Well, this is just a matter of secularization in general." Yet, everybody knows it's targeted towards one group in particular. You do have this emphasis on being a lay state, a lay Republic. Yet you have that emphasis in part because of who constitutes a danger to that group, to that idea.

Then if you look at the United States, one of the interesting things about the whole issue of religion in the US, if you look at who's probably the most liberal group of voters in the United States, it's probably Black women. Black women are also probably the most religious group of voters in the United States.

You have one example where the whole idea that being more religious means being more conservative doesn't work, but it's also the exception that proves the rule in some ways. That shows that there is a real association between religion. The rise of the religious right in the '70s, '80s and '90s was the key aspect to what I would say is an attempt to preserve and reinstate the idea of White freedom.

Vi: During the Trump administration key figures like Michael Pence, Mike Pompeo, and William Barr along with conservative groups like the influential Federalist Society advocated for imposing strict Christian values to counter the “rot” that threatened American society. Didn’t these sentiments give support to radical right White power groups who fear the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration, and the power of non-white voters?

Tyler Stovall: It is alive and well. As it turns out, my book came out two weeks after January 6th. I remember sitting and waiting for my book to come out, watching the events of that day. Oh, my God. I was thinking, "Is somebody now going to tell me that freedom is not White America." Because look at this. I never even imagined anything like that happening. It was really stunning. It's interesting for example that we've just gone through the 20th anniversary of September 11th. It was interesting to see former President George Bush, for example, get up and talk about how the real terrorist danger out America is basically White domestic terrorism.

VI: We also saw the outraged reaction by White conservatives to the New York Times 1619 Project which was an initiative to commemorate the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the English colony of Virginia and to trace the impact of slavery on the founding of this country. Isn’t this a manifestation of white freedom where the history of America needs to be told through a white lens?

Tyler Stovall: Right, or at least looking at the idea that American history involves anything that is racially based. That's just exceptional. It's the whole reaction against Critical Race Theory where state legislatures are banning even the mention of such topics in school curriculums. 

It's amazing. First of all, the idea of taking something that is basically a concept used by people in graduate school and saying you can't talk about that in third grade, I mean, it's pretty ridiculous when you think about it, but yes, it just shows that there's this fear. I've listened at times to people talking about these issues and there's just a basic level of ignorance. I remember hearing talk about railing against the idea of Critical Race Theory at school board meeting with a woman saying, "Well, how can you teach America as racist with 600,000 people dying in the civil war to free slavery?" I was like, "Well, ma'am half of those people were actually dying to preserve slavery."

All of this reaction demonstrates that there is a lot of fear in certain quarters. There's a fear that supposedly when America becomes officially majority non-white, whatever that means because that can be defined in many different kinds of ways, then all of a sudden, the “real” America will be lost. They'll have lost their country. It's tremendously disturbing to me that people are so afraid of this. That America is going down this evil path. From everything I've seen, America's increased diversity has made it a much more interesting and wonderful country.

VI: This seems to be a serious challenge of our times - the increasing tension between those who see social and economic progress for America in diversity and multiculturalism and reactionary forces that see these changes as threats to their perception of the “real” America where ‘white” values are the dominant social reality that assures that their “freedoms” are protected.

Your book focuses on this racial idea of freedom - putting it into an informative historical context that provides insights into how this notion of White freedom developed in parallel with Black slavery. Given where we are today, where do you see optimism about the reconciliation of these historical racial realities that will finally bring freedom to all people?

Tyler Stovall: I do have some optimism. It's interesting, one of the things that happens to you as you get older as a historian, especially if you're a historian of the modern period, is that your own mind starts to become part of the record that you study. For example, I was a college student in Boston in the 1970s. I actually lived through the whole era of bussing to end de facto segregation in Boston schools.

VI: I went to high school in South Boston in the 1960’s so I know this episode quite well.

Tyler Stovall: Okay. You remember what that was like then.

VI: I certainly do.

Tyler Stovall: Partly reflecting on that time I can see how things have improved. I  saw a news article recently about the mayoral race in Boston that to me was quite phenomenal.  For the first time in the history of that city all candidates were minorities - no white candidate in the race.

There is improvement. I think there is change and there is a reason to be optimistic. I really do.

VI: In other words, it's not just the changing demographics that will challenge the legacy and restrictions of White freedom. What you see is a distinct movement within the American populace that embraces the true meaning of a free democracy and promotes equality even in the face of the reactionary forces that were emboldened by the Trump administration and continue to threaten unrest in this country?

Tyler Stovall: Yes. Let me just throw in one other thing which is that I've always had tremendous faith in young people, I really do. I really believe that they are more enlightened, with better ideas and will see through these challenging times. The world they're going to make, the world they're going to inherit, is going to be a different and better world.

VI: We'll look forward to a more positive future. The insights you've put forward in your book help us to be informed about the past so that we can appreciate the vital role freedom plays in the course of human progress. Thanks very much for your book and this conversation.

Tyler Stovall: John, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Tylor Stovall is a seasoned administrator and lauded historian whose scholarship has focused on 20th-century France, issues of race and class, and transnational history, he is currently the dean of Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Formally Dr. Stovall was the dean of the Humanities Division and a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before he joined UCSC in 2015, he was dean of the Undergraduate Division of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2016 to 2017, he served as president of the American Historical Society, the oldest and largest society of historians and professors of history in the United States.

Dr. Stovall earned a Ph.D. in modern European/French history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of 10 books and numerous articles in the field of modern French history, with a specialization in transnational history, labor, colonialism, and race. His latest book is White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2021).