Tyler Stovall > Quotes

“The project of translating liberal ideas of freedom into the institutional framework of liberal democracy involved suppressing such alternate ideas of liberty, of in effect rendering them Other. The increasingly powerful template of racial difference in the modern era provided an influential way of doing so.”
― Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea

“To be free is to be white, and to be white is to be free. In this reading, therefore, freedom and race are not just enemies but also allies, frères ennemis whose histories cannot be understood separately. Put baldly, at its most extreme freedom can be and historically has been a racist ideology. The”
― Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea

“David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), explored at length the paradox of slavery and freedom in human history, noting that John Locke and other advocates of liberty at times supported the institution of human bondage.38 Other historians have noted the extent to which the call for freedom often assumed the form of a rejection of servitude, even among slaveholders themselves.39”
― Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea

“Soon after it was finished in the 1820s, the Capitol began to be called the “Temple of Liberty” because it was dedicated to the cherished ideas of freedom, equality, and self determination.”
― Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea