Tyler Stovall

"Freedom has been closely entangled with ideas of whiteness and white racial identity in modern history, so that to be free has often meant to be white, and vice versa."

"The president of the United States is not elected by the popular vote but by the Electoral College, so that at times the man who won the latter was not the most popular candidate. In the United States, what counts is winning a majority of the right people, not the people as a whole. This truism, with roots in the origins of the US Constitution, is underscored by the often racialized character of the limits to democracy in the US political system: The right people are all too often the white people. This is certainly the case with the Electoral College, but it is even more evident in the US Senate. The 10 smallest states have a total population of slightly less than Los Angeles County’s, yet they elect one-fifth of the Senate’s membership. These states are also whiter than the United States as a whole, giving white interests preponderant representation in the Senate. (One might wonder what would happen if these small states had mostly minority populations, but the closest analogy—the exclusion of Washington, D.C., from Senate representation—suggests an answer.)"

"People often talk about diversity as being important for marginalized communities … I think in our society as a whole, diversity is something that benefits all of us. Being exposed to people from different backgrounds, being able to interact with people with different experiences is something that we all learn from and makes all of our lives better."

"In 1987 President Ronald Reagan called upon the leaders of the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall, an appeal that became reality two years later. Roughly thirty years after Reagan’s famous speech, another American Republican president, Donald Trump, called on the leaders of Mexico to pay for the construction of a wall along the border between the US and Mexico. During his successful 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly announced his intentions to build a wall, and five days after he assumed office in January 2017 he signed Executive Order 13767 to begin its construction."

"Tyler Stovall should be remembered as a scholar who firmly believed that the writing and teaching of history was a political act. <...> Despite studying some of the worst aspects of human behavior, he always remained optimistic and held that a better world was possible, and that education was central to that goal. <...> He also challenged the stale notion that history should be confined within the framework of the nation-state. <...> He never forgot that so many of us love history for the stories. <...> Stovall’s last publications critique the global history of white supremacy, arguing that French and American notions of freedom were built upon the unfreedom of people of color. <...> He believed in fighting for justice instead of simply expecting it to happen. He firmly believed that we could build a more just society — and that we have a moral obligation to do so."