White Freedom

The Racial History of an Idea

Tyler Stovall

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691205373, 9780691179469
• eBook ISBN: 9780691205366
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

The racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedom

The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white.

Tyler Stovall explores the intertwined histories of racism and freedom in France and the United States, the two leading nations that have claimed liberty as the heart of their national identities. He explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. Taking readers from the Age of Revolution to today, Stovall challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty. Throughout the history of modern Western liberal democracy, freedom has long been white freedom.

A major work of scholarship that is certain to draw a wide readership and transform contemporary debates, White Freedom provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights.

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

Savage Freedom

PIRACY, CHILDHOOD, AND ALTERNATE RACIAL VISIONS OF LIBERTY

Some of the most intriguing characters in J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan are the “lost boys,” refugees from Victorian childhood living in the magical world of Neverland. Consisting of male infants¹ who had fallen out of their baby carriages and found their way to this alternate realm, the lost boys live a carefree life of eternal childhood alongside other beings sheltered from historical time: Captain Hook and his pirates; the Native Americans (or “redskins”) and their Tiger Lily.² They ally themselves with the ultimate lost boy, their leader Peter Pan, whose entire existence revolves around a refusal to grow up. The lost boys have much in common with these two groups, camping out in the woods, dressing up as animals, and in many ways living like primitives. As Barrie notes in chapter 5, “On this evening the chief forces of the island were disposed as follows. The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the redskins. They were going round and round the island, but they did not meet because all were going at the same rate.”³ The lost boys do not go to school or have to obey adults in general. Like Native Americans, pirates, and animals, they represent an image of savage freedom.

After a climactic battle in which Peter Pan and the lost boys kill the pirates, the boys return with the young heroine Wendy to the real world of middle-class England. They slay the pirates and leave behind their Native American allies and animal familiars to embrace all the pleasures of bourgeois childhood, and in doing so kill the primitive beings inside themselves. By the time the play ends, sometime in the future, the primitive boys have grown up to become white Englishmen with beards and jobs, at home in Edwardian middle-class society. Pirates must die and children, especially male children, must grow up as a part of the triumph of Western civilization. In Peter Pan, and in the world that produced it, savage freedom inexorably gives way to white freedom.⁴

Few concepts loom larger in the history of modernity and Western civilization more generally than freedom, on the one hand, and race on the other, and yet few seem more intrinsically different and opposed to each other. The idea of liberty is almost universally praised and seen as a key part of human progress, endlessly celebrated and reaffirmed. Few words in English or many other languages have a more positive connotation. Ideas of race and racial difference, in contrast, are generally condemned and considered something to be refuted or overcome. If the one represents the highest strivings and achievements of modernity, the other symbolizes its underside, how far Western civilization has to go in realizing its full potential. One stands for the potential of the individual to realize all of his or her potential and desires, the other the limits imposed by biology, community, and destiny. One represents light, the other darkness.

In this chapter I consider points of intersection between these two so radically different and opposed ideas in order to explore the idea that the coexistence of racism and freedom in the modern world is less a contradiction than the articulation of the variegated nature of both concepts and their manifold interactions over time. The fact that freedom could symbolize resistance to oppression and at the same time create its own types of racialized injustice speaks to the power and complexity of the idea, and the impossibility of considering it in isolation from other central modern concepts like race. I will explore how the amalgam of liberty and racial thought I call white freedom could arise out of the affinities between the two, how it is a product of their textual and theoretical interstices. The theory and historiography of both race and freedom is far from Black-and-white.⁵

In considering this complex relationship, the bulk of this chapter will focus on two very different groups and histories that illustrate alternate experiences of liberty, models that deviated from liberalism and ultimately had to be suppressed in order to create a liberal ideological and political order, and that represented a racial challenge to the idea of white freedom. I first will consider the history of piracy in the modern and contemporary eras. 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 suppression of the first aspect of piracy helped create the second, so that piracy presented a dual aspect that remains potent to this day.

The second is the history of childhood. The romantic idea of children as free and carefree has gone hand in hand with increasing regulation of childhood in the modern era, creating a fascinating dichotomy between ideas of liberty and authoritarian realities. This dichotomy has frequently sparked revolts by children and especially by teenagers, so that many have regarded adolescence as a particularly turbulent time of life. Like piracy, the idea of childhood freedom was both a romanticized fantasy and a racialized reality that had to be suppressed to enable the triumph of liberal ideas of freedom.

This chapter will thus consider the histories of childhood and piracy as examples of racial alternatives to white freedom, visions of “savage” freedom that had to be suppressed. As I will explore in greater detail below, in the modern era both pirates and children represented a departure from, even a rejection of, increasingly racialized ideas of freedom. In both cases it was not a great leap from the rebel to the barbarian, from the political and cultural outsider to the racial Other. In particular, the dominant society portrayed both as savages, groups that one must either civilize or eliminate. Children would hopefully grow into a mature idea of freedom, facilitated by the rise of an extensive infrastructure of formal education. Civilized society must eradicate piracy, either by capturing and executing the actual pirates or by integrating their economic practices into the broader structures of liberal capitalism. Both piracy and childhood represented the kind of savage liberty white freedom must ultimately destroy.

As noted above, freedom has not always been a positive value nor has it always followed the strictures of liberal political theory; as Isaiah Berlin observed, “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”⁶ Liberty was thus not automatically benevolent but had to be made so by suppressing the negative aspects of the idea, and the process of constructing a positive image of freedom had a strong racial dimension. This chapter will briefly consider that process, arguing that liberty became white by divesting itself of qualities seen as primitive or retrograde. True freedom belonged to the civilized, and civilization was itself increasingly defined in racial terms during the modern era: the barbarians of the jungle might revel in a spirit of anarchy, but only those of culture and enlightenment could build a society based upon freedom. Racial difference was built into the very definition of liberty, therefore, in ways that would both foster and result from racialized ideas of freedom as white.

Liberty and Race

Similarities, Differences, Intersections

I began this chapter by noting how freedom and race are both extremely important ideas in Western civilization, and how at the same time they seem to be so different from each other, one positive, one negative. In particular, the historiography of racialized minorities has embraced the idea of freedom as freedom struggles; an individual or a group becomes free by overcoming racism and the limits of racial identity. The end of racial difference is the triumph of freedom.⁷ Upon closer examination, however, the Manichean polarity between liberty as good and race as bad tends to break down. Race became a powerful means of categorizing humanity precisely because so many people, scholars as well as ordinary women and men, saw it as useful and beneficial. At the same time freedom has had its own negative aspects; as Orlando Patterson has observed, liberty has not been the most important concept in many cultures throughout human history. The concept of white freedom challenges the polarity between liberty and race as good and evil, underscoring the ways in which modern political cultures integrated a racialized view of the world into their ideas of freedom.

The trauma of the Holocaust, the crusade for Black civil rights in the United States, and the tidal wave of decolonization that swept the globe in the twenty years after the end of World War II all combined to craft an image of racial thinking as an unmitigated evil. It is important to emphasize, however, that this was not always the case. From the late seventeenth until the mid-twentieth century racial categorization was viewed as very much a part of progressive science, further illuminating the relationship between humanity and the natural world. The emphasis of Enlightenment intellectuals like Kant on classifying and ranking different human races, the social Darwinism and scientific racism of the nineteenth century, all illustrated the importance of racial thinking. One must also stress the fact that racial science did not necessarily equal racism: Count Arthur de Gobineau, for example, rejected anti-Semitism and he and other racial theorists opposed slavery. For many, the study of racial difference would enable scientists to improve the lives of all racial communities by understanding their biological potentials and limitations.

Another important positive dimension of racial thinking lay in its relationship to the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century.⁸ The mingling of ideas of nation and race represented a sharp departure from the tradition of racial thought in Europe, which had first become prominent as a way of characterizing the aristocracy, a group linked by blood and certainly not by national identity.⁹ Yet the rise of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century highlighted the importance of national character shaped by history, turning the idea of the nation into an organic cultural unit rather than simply a political structure.¹⁰ Völkisch ideology in Germany is the most salient example of this new view of the nation as race, but it hardly stood alone.¹¹ Even Ernst Renan, the French scholar whose famous 1882 essay “What Is a Nation?” challenged the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and others who championed racial nationalism, saw France as a mixture of racial types rather than characterized by their absence.¹² Moreover, Renan’s portrayal of France as united around history and spiritual principle in effect tended to racialize the nation.¹³ By the end of the century the increased predominance of the nation-state as a political and cultural construct made racial pride an important part of national patriotism.

Racially subordinate groups have also embraced the ideal of racial pride, usually as a response to and rejection of racial oppression. The processes by which peoples who are lumped together according to stereotypes and discrimination develop a positive sense of group identity are extremely complex; like nations, racial minorities must be constructed over time. Scholars have studied how slaves from a variety of places in Africa gradually became Black Americans in the United States, or how modern Zionism crafted a new nation from diverse Jewish populations.¹⁴ The point is that such processes involved creating a positive sense of racial identity, often modeled on that of the nation: the term Black nationalism is no accident. From the idea of the “race man” as someone dedicated to Black community empowerment to the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s, r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Freedom and Its Dark Sides
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Conclusion: White Freedom and Freedom from Whiteness
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index