White Eminence and the Case for Responsible Freedom (original) (raw)
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White freedom the racial history of an idea
White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea Author: Tyler Stovall Description: In White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, Tyler Stovall investigates the paradox of freedom as a foundational value in Western democracies, arguing that this concept has often been intertwined with whiteness. Stovall critically examines how Western ideals of freedom have frequently excluded non-white populations, revealing the racialized underpinnings of liberty from the Enlightenment to the present day. By analyzing pivotal historical events and ideologies across France, the United States, and colonial empires, Stovall shows how freedom has been constructed in ways that privilege white identities and reinforce racial hierarchies. This book presents a nuanced critique of the global history of freedom, asking readers to reconsider how ideals of liberty and equality have perpetuated systemic racism. Areas of Study: This book is key for studies in: - Critical Race Theory - Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies - Modern and Contemporary History - Sociology and Political Science - Enlightenment and Philosophy of Freedom - American and European Studies - Studies of Nationalism and Identity Stovall’s interdisciplinary approach makes White Freedom a vital contribution to understanding how race and freedom have been historically entangled, influencing contemporary views on democracy, rights, and citizenship.
Power and Education, 2011
Certain radical race scholars argue that white people can and must act in anti-racist ways as part of a project that aims to end racial identities built on inequality, terror and domination. Yet revisioning the white subject as non-oppressive should not be the primary goal of anti-racism, as this re-centralises concern for those benefiting from whiteness. In this article, the author considers the ongoing erasure of white responsibility for race inequalities, and analyses the merits and tensions of 'critical race' and 'race critical' principles for exposing, politicising and countering them. He agrees with assertions that responsibilisation for race inequality is a radical process that cannot imply a finite state for individuals ('good/bad whites'); it is a process that must involve constant turns away from the Self and towards the Other. Acts of white anti-racist transgression must not be reduced to ever having taken 'full personal' responsibility for race inequality. However, for different reasons, caution needs to be exercised about assuming a universal, fixed, knowable white self at the centre of such acts, one which always successfully inhabits being white. Contributing to 'race-critical/post-race' scholarship, the author uses Butler's (2005) separation of agency from responsibility to think about responsibility as the task of the immeasurably whitened self.
Ethnicities, 2006
The article addresses the nature of power relations that sustain and disguise white racial hegemony in contemporary ‘western’ society. Following the insights offered by critical race theory (CRT), white supremacy is conceived as a comprehensive condition whereby the interests and perceptions of white subjects are continually placed centre stage and assumed as ‘normal’. These processes are analysed through two very different episodes. The first example relates to a period of public crisis, a moment where ‘what really matters’ is thrown into relief by a set of exceptional circumstances, in this case, the London bombings of July 2005. The second example relates to the routine and unexceptional workings of national assessment mechanisms in the education system and raises the question whether assessments merely record educational inequity or actually produce it. These apparently divergent cases are linked by the centrality of white interests and the mobilization of structural and cultura...
The Five Refusals of White Supremacy
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2018
This article draws on the work of Charles Mills to posit white supremacy as a global political, economic, and cultural system. Resistance among people of color is, and has always been, widespread. The focus here, however, is on what Mills (1997: 18) describes as the “epistemology of ignorance” among whites themselves, serving to preserve a sense of self as decent in the face of privileges dependent upon obvious injustices against (nonwhite) others. Five themes are identified within a broad and multidisciplinary range of literature, described here as the “five refusals” of white supremacy. These are points at which white ignorance must be actively maintained in order to preserve both a sense of the self and of the wider structures of white privilege and dominance. There is a refusal of the humanity of the other—and a willingness to allow violence and exploitation to be inflicted. There is a refusal to listen to or acknowledge the experience of the other—resulting in marginalization and active silencing. There is a refusal not just to confront long and violent histories of white domination, but to recognize how these continue to shape injustice into the present. There is a refusal to share space, particularly residential space, with resulting segregated geographies that perpetuate inequality and insulate white ignorance. Finally there is a refusal to face structural causes—capitalism as it has intertwined with white supremacy from its earliest beginnings. To undo one requires the undoing of the others. For each refusal there is a potential affirmation, presented here in the hope that each might provide an understanding of the breadth of work required to dismantle white supremacy and of the multiple points for intervention.
Collective Responsibility as Resistance to White Supremacy
Philosophy and Global Affairs, 2023
This article offers a model of collective responsibility that arises out of group implication in the persistent injustices of racism and colonialism. It engages with a case study of Jewish refugees who arrived in the Americas in the aftermath of the 1492 Spanish Edict of Expulsion. There, it identifies a strategy of survival grounded in identification with white Christians at the top of the colonial hierarchy and disidentification with Black and Native peoples at the bottom. This identification yielded benefits for colonial Jews and those (the author included) who inherit their place in the colonial racial hierarchy. These benefits were at the expense of Black and Native peoples in the Americas. The article highlights the relational harms—to others and themselves—inherent in group complicity with white supremacy. It concludes by outlining the forms of collective responsibility that could counteract these harms and create relationality beyond white supremacy.
NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences, 2023
The book is the last published project of late Fordham University professor Tyler Stovall. All his previous work was devoted to French history, but in his last book he opened up the scope of his analysis to include the United States in order to explore how ideas of freedom in the modern world have been racialized (5), eventually becoming what he calls “white freedom”, the belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free (11). Stovall published a well-researched and beautifully written book in order to explain this paradox (an apparently all-inclusive notion, such as freedom as understood in the modern world being restricted to a certain category of people and denied to the rest of humanity).
White Supremacy and Antiblackness: Theory and Lived Experience
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2021
Our goal in understanding white supremacy should be theory building, viewed as instrumental in providing explanation and prediction as a foundation for activism. As humanists and social scientists, and more particularly as anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists, we should take to heart not only anthropology's mandate to be holistic, comparative, and historical but also the tradition of anthropological theorizing. Lived experience is the substance of the, perhaps temporarily, ineffable structure of feeling, shaping, and structuring what we should desperately want theory to account for, including our pain, resentments, hatreds, longing, and joy-even the air we breathe and the rivers flowing among the United States, which are shaped by-fused with-white supremacy and antiblackness. White supremacy seeks to be totalitarian, even as it is contained by and/or co-constructed by not only ancillary systems such as gender-, class-, and sexuality-based ones but also larger systems such as capitalism, purposeful violence, and the state's quest for hegemony. In this writing's search for a deeper and broader comprehension of white supremacy, discussions are presented on underdiscussed themes in white supremacy, such as the "whitening" power of language, and additionally two key issues: (1) the change currently underway in the United States'white-supremacist racial system from a race-primary system toward a skin-color primary system, accompanying a likely change in the basic principle for defining whiteness and (2) the necessity to understand that white supremacy is a key element in the degradation and exploitation of, not only labor of color but also white labor-to a lesser extent, and the looming possibility going forward of the United States' decline domestically and internationally. [white supremacy, anti-blackness, racism, race theory, racial passing]