ooh, would you be willing to elaborate on your thoughts about hannah arendt? we discussed in class two chapters of her book eichmann in jerusalem, but there wasn't much time dedicated to the critiques of her work(s)
one sad thing about deleting my old blog is no one remembers i was fighting to be no 1 hater of hannah arendt on this website. in short she was very racist, her theorizing about africans repeatedly characterizes them as savages, her central theory of totalitarianism relies on racist tropes about oriental despotism and is also constantly in tension with her desire to exceptionalise the nazi holocaust regime from colonial racism by claiming said racism was either justifiable or had a utilitarian logic.
in her actual political life she was opposed to desegregation and deeply racist to black students and professors during the ongoing fight against jim crow. she was a defender of the american project, both its settler colonialism and even its slavery.
lots of really ugly quotes ahead
Consider chapter seven of Imperialism, ‘Race and Bureaucracy’, which contains the section, ‘The Phantom World of the Dark Continent’. [...]
They ‘can be watched like a laboratory test in the Boers’ [...] To Arendt, they were ‘the only European group that ever, though in complete isolation, had to live in a world of black savages’. Their racism, Arendt claimed, was 'the emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or civilized man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species’. In a kind of nineteenth-century environmental and demographic determinism, Arendt depicted the Boers - and her own sense of the ‘overwhelming monstrosity of Africa’, the ‘merciless sun’ and ‘entirely hostile nature’, the ‘great horror’ of a place ‘populated and overpopulated by savages’ as "incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse’. All this gave ‘Boer racism, unlike other ther brands, a 'touch of authenticity’. Arendt quotes extensively from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness to substantiate her claims about what happened to European identity in the encounter with the extreme other. Fear and repugnance, when refracted through new ideologies of race, almost inevitably led them to ‘Exterminate the brutes!’ Arendt was seeking to show the effects of the Boers inability to accord equal worth to those they viewed as ‘alien’. [...]
Hannah Arendt was not seeking to justify extermination or massacres, but in her effort to ‘understand the experiential basis’ of the Boers’ moral failings she came too close to apologetics. Specifically, she suggested that Boer racism was different, even justifiable, because of the character of the peoples it was directed against. ‘African savages… had frightened Europeans out of their wits’. Like Hegel and Marx, it was self-evident to Arendt that ‘tribal’ Africans were more primitive than Europeans; ‘as far as we know, [they] had never found by themselves any adequate expression of human reason or human passion in either cultural deeds or popular customs, and which had developed human institutions only to a very low level’. Aware of the obvious implications, Arendt distanced the issue from ‘race’ to implicate the capacity to rise above ‘nature’. ‘What made them different from other human beings’, she wrote, ‘was not at all the color of their skin but… that they treated nature like their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality’. Arendt’s principle agenda was not to denigrate ‘tribal’ Africans as such, but to show that because they ‘were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, …when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.’ [...]
She rationalised and even sympathised with
racist tropes. Consider her comment on the ‘boomerang effect’ on Chinese and Indian
laborers imported to southern Africa; ‘for the first time, people were treated in almost the
same way as those African savages... The difference was only that there could be no
excuse and no humanly comprehensible reason for treating Indians and Chinese as
though they were not human beings. In a certain sense it is only here that the real crime
began, because here everyone ought to have known what they were doing’.[...]
Rather than seek to understand why anti-racist activists might situate themselves within wider anticolonial and neocolonial
struggles, that is, in the context of global white supremacy, Arendt reduced black solidarity to a crass demographic calculation. She presented black students as more violent than whites, with the backing of the wider ‘black community’. ‘Serious violence’,
she claimed, ‘entered the scene only with the appearance of the Black Power movement on American campuses. Negro students, the majority of them admitted without academic
qualification, regarded and organized themselves as an interest group, the representatives of the black community’. These black students then made ‘nonsensical and obviously damaging demands’ such as instruction in the ‘nonexistent subjects’ of African literature,
‘soul courses’, and Swahili, ‘a nineteenth-century kind of no-language’. The ‘white
rebels’, in contrast, put forth ‘disinterested and usually highly moral claims’, such as
support for ‘nonviolent “participatory democracy." [...]
She acknowledged that ‘the extermination of native peoples went hand in hand with the colonization of the Americas, Australia and Africa’. But
she also claimed that North America and Canada were ‘almost empty and had no serious
population problem’. Echoing the Africa of Origins, these were places ‘without a culture
and a history of their own.’ [...]
In Arendt’s eyes, neither the annihilation of Native Americans nor the institution of chattel slavery was enough to discredit her fabled version of the American Revolution. She claimed that in the eighteenth-century American slaveholders viewed slavery as only a temporary institution and that the Founders knew that slavery and ‘the
foundation of freedom’ were incompatible. But she did not analyse the contradiction in
any depth, nor did she extend her condemnation of European imperialists to the American
founders. Instead, she suggested that slavery was not as bad as statelessness [interwar], for at least slave labour ‘was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of
humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society - more than the abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human’. Yet slaves were not conceived as ‘fully human’; they were property. Arendt did not accuse the
American revolutionaries of the same hypocrisy as the interwar statesmen and humanitarians who insisted that the millions of stateless really were in possession of ‘inborn’ and ‘inalienable’ rights. Instead, she praised the Founders for not falling under the sway of the Social Question - poverty and the ‘degrading misery… of slavery and Negro labor’ - to focus on founding institutions for political freedom. Slavery was a price worth paying to found an enduring republican government for some: the American
slaveholders.
Racism in the Theory Canon: Hannah Arendt and ‘the one Great Crime in which America was Never Involved’ by Patricia Owens
