Anyway, minus well start this. If any folks are interested and want me to tweet a bit as I read, I’m happy to.

Already shook by this blurb by philosopher Charles Mills (whose seminal work, “The Racial Contract,” should be central to any and every discussion about social contract theory + contemporary political philosophy, and not just as a non-white foil to Hobbes, Locke, Kant, et al)

The intro lays out some really clear contradictions between Arendt’s claimed philosophical position and her interaction with anti-blackness as a Negro problem as opposed to a white one, especially in her exchanges with Baldwin.

It’s interesting she frames black parents who integrate their children into white schools as aspirant social climbers as opposed to victims of systemic discrimination (ie the pariah); it mirrors her critiques of Jews who assimilate (ie the parvenu).

“Arendt saw in black people’s struggles for integration all the dilemmas of Jewish assimilation” — Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

But this is confusing bc she sees the historical Jewish question as completely unrelated to the Negro question (the latter an intra-communal issue to her).

Here are book’s three main claims:

“The country’s attitude toward the Negro population is rooted in American tradition and nothing else. The color question was created by the one great crime of American history and is soluble only within the political & historical framework of the Republic.” - Hannah Arendt lmfao

Idk if y’all have read “Reflections on Little Rock” (where that quote is from), but it is RACIST racist
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59fba9cbe5dd5b9070bb5adb/5b491e34f60e7c17d1375309/5b491ff3f60e7c17d13777c2/1531518963576/Reflections-on-Little-Rock.pdf?format=original

I have my own feelings about assimilation and integration but her equation of fighting for equal/desegregated education as a matter of social mobility vs. one of state-enforced rights is actually maniacal.

"What would I do if I were a white mother in the South? I would deny that the government has any right to tell me in whose company my child receives its instruction."

Hannah Arendt...arguing on behalf of the rights of white parents...to have segregated schools....

Before I get into chapter 2, I want to say I think Arendt’s disctinctions between the social & the political are bullshit. And it’s bullshit these bifurcating distinctions used by some of her defenders to explain why her affair with Heidegger isn’t relevant to her work.

Arendt treats integration as a social problem and doesn’t believe the state should intervene, but she vehemently objects to racial marriage laws because free marriage is an inalienable right...and doesn’t seem to see that these anti-black regulations of life are connected.

What is equal education if not the expectation the government of the country where you are a citizen (obvious caveat on “citizen” notwithstanding) has an obligation to uphold/enforce your rights as an equal? But bc it’s a social issue, she sees integration as individual ambition.

We’re forced to accept her categories of what constitutes public and private life as though they aren’t fluid. A man who is a Klan member does so in his social/private life, but if he is also a judge, that affiliation is also a political matter. Why is this so hard for her?!

She does a good job picking apart Arendt on how “the rise of the social” has forced private life into the public: the complete separation of the two (as in Ancient Greece) is only made possible by the subjugation/exclusion of some (women & slaves) so others may fully participate.

This is important to note as Belle proceeds to describe how Arendt treats slavery as a social question rather than a political one even as she describes it as a crime and acknowledges the founders understood the institution as undermining the political principle of freedom.

Though Arendt takes up the issue of slavery and participation in the public realm in the Ancient Greek context, “she neglected to take up the strong dialectical relationship between freedom and slavery in the United States” (64). She also decouples slavery and race, which....ok.

She’s completely neglecting the fact that the condition of chattel servitude constitutes expulsion from/non-inclusion the category of the human; in her comparison(s) “Arendt is overlooking the fact that...the Negro is denied both political *and* human qualities” (72)

I’m really verklempt but totally unsurprised that even as Arendt criticizes the Declaration of the Roghts of Man and Citizen wrt the French Revolution, she doesn’t talk about French slavery or the Haitian Revolution in a book about revolution. Starting to sense a pattern here!

Now as we get into her writing on Nazism, Belle walks us through her genealogical distinctions between racism and race thinking (which she disconnects) and totalitarianism & imperialism and colonialism. And these distinctions which can get, unsurprisingly, quite hierarchical.

While she is one of the very few white scholars articulate explicit relationships between “the bourgeoisie, racism, and imperialism on the one hand and the attempted obliteration of the Jewish people, on the other” she still favors arguments of Shoah uniqueness.

I finished the book but I stopped tweeting because you get the gist. Hannah Arendt had a massive anti-blackness problem and any responsible scholar of hers ought to carefully interrogate how it inform(s/ed) her writings on literally everything.