2023 Text Seminar: Arendt and/on Race

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Historical Background

Hannah Arendt is one of few canonical political thinkers who wrote extensively about race. The Origins of Totalitarianism contains two key chapters on the emergence of racism as a political ideology and the way racism works through bureaucratic as opposed to legal governance. As a Jew who suffered through the rise and reign of Nazism, she analyzed antisemitism as a form of racism. In seeking to understand the ideological power of antisemitism, she came to understand both antisemitism and racism as anti-legal, anti-national, and globalist ideologies based upon quasi-scientific ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. Race, she argued, is "not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death." 

Arendt’s arrival in the United States in 1940 confronted her with new racial and racist dynamics, particularly with the legacy of slavery and anti-Black racism but also with new forms of “minority” activism. In fact, her most prominent conceptual contribution to political theory, the notion of power, may have taken inspiration from what were arguably the most important grassroots political phenomena of her time, Civil Rights and the Black Power movements that followed it. A look at her library and references shows that Arendt was aware both of contemporary research on race, (for instance of the work of Ruth Benedict who, in her 1940 book Race: Science and Politics, deconstructs the concept of race) as well as of analyses of the political strategies of anti-racist activism as described, for instance, in Arthur Waskow’s From Race Riot to Sit-In (1966). She also wrote, often scathingly, about student and Black Power activism and ideas, such as those outlined in the “Black Manifesto” (1969) of the National Black Economic Development Conference under James Foreman. Privately, Arendt’s archive shows some traces of correspondence on the question of race. Namely, she read and responded to James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Her one attempt to engage in public discourse around U.S. racism was her publication of the essay "Reflections on Little Rock," which sought to warn against forced integration of schools.  

In the last decade, scholarly and public attention has raised the question of Hannah Arendt’s standing on the question of race, particularly as it relates to her understanding of the Black experience in the United States. Her writings on antisemitism, colonialism, and racism show not so much a unified theory of race or racism than an impulse to draw parallels between racialized minorities on the one hand and an effort to situate race within fundamental distinctions such as private and public, political and social on the other. Above all, Arendt distinguishes racism as an ideology of legal superiority from what she alternatively calls race thinking, prejudice, or social discrimination. These distinctions place race squarely in Arendt’s political project, but they have also drawn criticism that raises questions not only about Arendt’s ideas on race, but about her notion of politics as a whole.