‘FOr me, history is a record of not only how things change, but how people change things, how they act individually and collectively to create a better world. , American historian Tyler Stowell wrote About his attitude towards his craft. The echoes of such historians as EP Thompson and Eric Foner, Barbara Fields and Robin D.G. Kelly are unmistakable in his work.
A historian primarily from France, Stovall’s work draws on a number of important current themes – the relationship between race and class, the tension between universalism and exclusiveness, the contradictions of liberalism. Yet very few people outside the world of education know about him and him. death last month was almost unmarked in the mainstream media, a testament, perhaps, to the narrow-mindedness of our culture. Connecting with his work is a useful means of illuminating many contemporary debates.
Stovall’s early research in the 1980s focused on building working-class communities, particularly in the “Red Belt” around Paris. Increasingly, however, his attention was drawn to some blind spots in French historiography, particularly issues of race and imperialism. His studies of French colonialism and colonial labor in France helped to challenge the idea of a color-blind nation, not influenced by the racism that surrounded the Anglo-Saxon world, and helped to choose the ways in which , which may have traditions of French sovereignty. Depriving the rights and dignity of those who were not deemed to belong.
Stowell’s last book, white freedom, published last year, was in some ways the culmination of his life’s endeavor. Yet it is as depressing as it is enlightening, revealing the importance of his work and exposing the fallacies that plague contemporary thinking about race.
Modern ideas of freedom and independence, Stovall observed, emerged along with the principles of race. While liberty and racism are generally viewed as opposing claims, in reality, they are in fact inextricably linked, as the ideals of liberty and liberty have eclipsed the exclusion of non-whites. As such, they bear “the unmistakable seal of whiteness and white racial ideology”.
Undoubtedly, many of the thinkers who helped shape modern ideas of freedom and liberty followed racist views and supported exclusionary practices. John Locke, often regarded as the founding philosopher of liberalism, defended slavery and owned shares in a slave-trader company. Enlightenment great Immanuel Kant believed that “humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the white”. The French revolutionaries, who proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man, denied equal rights to slaves, unless forced to do so by a rebellion in the colony of Saint Domingue. Abraham Lincoln started the Civil War that ended slavery in America but also stressed that he was “in no way in favor of bringing about social and political equality of the white and black races”.
For all this, Stovall’s own work suggests that the struggle over the meaning of freedom was more complex than such a notion as “white liberty”. The demand that certain groups be excluded from the benefits of liberty was primarily driven not by racial concerns, but by political needs, particularly fears of social disorder. During the 19th century, Stovall points out, France was torn between a “radical vision of democracy … without the French Revolution-criminal” and a liberal desire to “not endanger private property”. This conflict led to the 1830 and 1848 and 1871 revolutions of the Paris Commune. The crushing of these revolutionary challenges led to the institutionalization of more restrictive notions of freedom.
The tension described here by Stovall dates back to the 17th century and dates back to the 20th century. In the famous Putney debate during the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Iraton spoke for the officer class. Asserting “Freedom in the ordinary sense cannot be granted if property is to be protected”. A century later, it was the question heart of struggle between the radicals and the moderates of the Enlightenment. Liberal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century Thomas Macaulay argued, in response to Chartist’s demands for democracy, that “universal suffrage … is incompatible with property” and therefore “with civilisation”.
The notion of race provided a means of recognizing inequalities as natural and inevitable. This became the justification for slavery, the brutal treatment of colonial subjects, and the denial of rights to non-white people in Europe and America. It was also a justification for suppressing the rights of the working class. In the 19th century, as Stovall acknowledges, the working class was seen as a distinct and inferior caste. The French Christian socialist Philippe Bouchez wondered how “within a population like ours, races can be so pathetic, inferior, and bastards that they can be classified below the lowest barbarian races, because of their inferiority.” – Is it ever beyond cure? He was talking not of Africans or Asians, but of the working class and rural poor of France.
Racial division also became a means to end the ruling order’s challenges by assuring white workers that their interests lay in their “whiteness” and not in their status as workers. For example, in the American South, “Jim Crow” laws, which enforced apartheid-style segregation, were implemented at the turn of the 20th century, primarily in response to “fusion” movements, which created black workers and black workers. organized. Brought together poor white farmers. to challenge the established order and, In North Carolina, Win PowerViolent start of Democrats ousted from power “White Supremacy Campaign” To break the coalition, to gain the support of the white working class and to gain political control in order to treat blacks as outcasts.
This complex relationship between liberty, race, class and whiteness is perpetuated by concepts such as “white liberty”. Nor is it merely a matter of history. “Whiteness” has become an idea today by racists and many racists, one claiming that all white people have an equal group of interests, the other defining racism as “white privilege”. In doing so, both, in different ways, obscure the political and structural causes of racism on the one hand, and, on the other, make it even more difficult to challenge the social problems facing the working class.
Tyler Stovall’s work is instrumental in illuminating previously neglected areas of class, race and colonialism and should be better known and nurtured. This too must be challenged and questioned, especially the argument about “white liberty”. Intellectual legacies, like liberty, are always opposed.