VRG: Arendt on Race #2 (Race and Bureaucracy, Chapter 7 of Origins of Totalitarianism)

March 10, 2023
We discussed: Race and Bureaucracy (Chapter 7 of Origins of Totalitarianism)
For full schedule see here: hac.bard.edu/p...
HANNAH ARENDT ON RACE AND RACISM
After completing Hannah Arendt's The Jewish Writings, a collection of texts largely written in the 1940s at the height of antisemitic persecution and just before the founding of the state of Israel, the Virtual Reading Group will turn to Arendt's later writings on race and racism. These include chapters from the book that made her famous, The Origins of Totalitarianism, as well as a number of shorter texts in which the exiled German-American theorist tried to grapple with the realities of race in America. Most notoriously, Arendt's essay on the Little Rock Nine and school desegregation caused an uproar upon its publication in 1959. In the aftermath of this controversy, Arendt received a letter from Ralph Ellison to which she responded with an interesting admission of oversight. To complement her responses to contemporary events like desegregation and campus protests by black students, we will also read her foundational Introduction to Politics, which situates the political precisely vis-a-vis prejudice. Together, these texts constitute an opportunity for thinking about how Arendt understood anti-black racism in the US in light of her writings on prejudice and ideology, on the one hand, and on Jews and antisemitism, on the other.

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