Book Review: Tyler Edward Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.

Abstract

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).