RELATED TERMS: Black Studies; Intersectionality; Native Studies
Use for: Critical Whiteness Studies
Kenan Malik (2022) discusses the work of American historian Tyler Stovall, particularly his final book, White Freedom, a book, Malik says, that while demonstrating the significance of his work also exhibits the confusions that plague contemporary thinking about race.
For Stovall, liberty and racism are inextricably linked, because ideals of freedom and liberty assumed the exclusion of non-whites. In so doing, Stovall concludes, freedom and liberty bear the “stamp of whiteness and white racial ideology”.
While it must be conceded that many thinkers who helped to shape modern ideas of freedom and liberty, such as Locke, Kant, the revolutionaries in France who proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Abraham Lincoln, held racist views and supported exclusionary practices, nevertheless, Malik points out, Stovall’s own work shows that the struggle over the meaning of freedom was more complex than can be captured by a notion such as ‘white freedom’.
Malik argues that it was not primarily racial concerns but rather political considerations, particularly fears of social disorder, that led to demands for certain groups be excluded from the benefits of freedom. Stovall shows that throughout the 19th century France was torn between “the radical vision of democracy championed by … the sans-culottes of the French Revolution” and the liberal desire to “not endanger private property”, a struggle which provoked the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the 1871 Paris Commune. The institutionalisation of more restricted notions of freedom followed on from the crushing of these revolutionary challenges. This tension, which goes back to the 17th century, continued into the 20th century.
The language of race, by providing a means of casting inequalities as natural and inevitable, became the justification for enslavement, the brutal treatment of colonial subjects and the denial of rights to non-white peoples both in Europe and America. It was also the justification for suppressing working-class rights since, In the 19th century, the working class was viewed as a distinct and inferior race.
Racial divisions thus came to serve as a means to dismantle challenges to the ruling order by persuading white workers that their interests lay in their ‘whiteness’, not in their status as workers. In the American south, for example, so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws that imposed apartheid-style segregation were mainly enforced at the turn of the 20th century in response to the ‘Fusion’ movements, which brought together black workers and poor white farmers, to challenge the established order and, in North Carolina, win power. The Democrats, the ousted ruling party, launched a violent ‘white supremacy campaign’ to rupture the coalition, win white working-class support for treating blacks as outcasts and regain political control.
Malik contends that this complex relationship between liberties, race, class and whiteness is ill-served by a concept such as ‘white freedom’. This is not just an issue of only historical significance because the notion of ‘whiteness’ has become fetishised today both by racists and by many anti-racists. The former claim that all white people have a common set of interests. The latter reframe racism as ‘white privilege’. In so doing, both, in different ways, obscure the political and structural reasons for racism, on the one hand, and the social problems facing the working class, on the other. This makes it more difficult to challenge either racial discrimination and violence and class oppression and alienation.
According to Andrew Hartman (2014), the best work in the field of whiteness studies is Alexander Saxton’s The Rise and Fall of the White Republic. Saxton, Hartman writes, was one of the first scholars to publish an explicit examination of whiteness. He anticipated the criticism of those, such as Eric Arneson and Peter Kolchin, who argued that, “whiteness studies has been plagued by three deficiencies: a problem of definition; assertions that immigrant groups such as the Irish had to become white on arrival; and the use of whiteness as a psychological wage” (Hartman, 2014: 23). Historical investigations of whiteness should be measured against The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, a work, Hartman suggests, that is so good and so far ahead of its time that it will render obsolete the very thing that it sought to build: whiteness studies.
References
Baum, B. (2011) On the history of American whiteness [a review of The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter, Reviews in American History, 39(3), pp. 488–493. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23014351 (Accessed: 3 November 2022).
Engles, T. (ed.) (2006) Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies. Urbana, IL: Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Hartman, A. (2004) The rise and fall of whiteness studies, Race and Class, 46(2), pp. 22–38. doi: 10.1177/0306396804047723.
Kolchin, P. (2009) Whiteness studies, Journal de la Société des américanistes, 95(1), pp. 117–163. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24606420 (Accessed: 3 November 2022).
Malik, K. (2022) We talk a lot about freedom – but not enough about whose freedom is at stake, Observer, p. 47. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/02/race-class-freedom-liberty-and-work-of-historian-tyler-stovall (Accessed: 10 January 2022).
Painter, N. I. (2010) The History of white people. New York, NY: W W Norton.
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