… sprawling yet focused … clear and engaging. It offers fresh insight to the idea of liberty — an idea that is increasingly at the fore of societal concern. Stovall doesn’t preach; he doesn’t try to convince anyone to come to his side. He offers essential context to the history of the development of freedom, and engaging analysis supported by carefully researched evidence. Stovall gives us all the information we need, and then challenges us to look deeper … an historical analysis; it is not a polemic — Stovall has no obligation to provide a blueprint for a way forward … Perhaps the best way to read Stovall’s history is to employ the book as an object through which to examine our own experiences of liberty. White Freedom has much to tell us, if we let it, about how racism has been built into so many of our systems and institutions, and about how what we see as freedom isn’t really freedom for all.
