Hannah Arendt was a huge racist.

Does anybody have a good article? I googled and I got annoyed. I clicked the top result and then I realized it was a goddamned fucking pdf. I clicked a promising result but it's behind a paywall.

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The following article might be behind a sign-up nag. In my first browser - I got the nag. In other - I didn't.

I tried to archive it twice in Archive.Today but it didn't work.

Why I'm Angry with Hannah Arendt. You may have heard that my best friend… | by Rebecca Buxton | Medium

Rebecca Buxton

Aug 14, 2019·5 min read

You may have heard that my friend Lisa and I are editing a book on women philosophers. I'm writing the chapter on Arendt for the book. Having worked at the intersections between forced migration and philosophy, I'm pretty familiar with her work — I've read her discussion on refugees more times than I dare to count. When we approached writers and no-one seemed interested in this chapter, I decided that I would take on this important responsibility myself.

I began reading about Arendt more and more. I watched her interview with Gunter Gus, Hannah Arendt: Zur Person, in which she discussed her childhood, her interest in politics, and her escape from Nazi Germany. I read many books about her writing and life: Why Read Hannah Arendt Now, The Right to Have Rights, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times. I ate, slept, and breathed Arendt. I then turned to her own writing. I reread We Refugees and the chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism that all refugee studies scholars know by heart. I began working through On Revolution and The Human Condition — slowly, it must be said. Arendt is not the most readable of writers.

After a few weeks, I received a message from a good friend. She had seen that I was writing on Arendt. She wrote "By the way, please don't hate me — I have to bring this up — sorry but not sorry — but Hannah Arendt has some horrific racist stuff. Just a heads up!" I replied that I wasn't surprised. Most philosophers are racist, sexist, or homophobic. I decided to put something about this in the book chapter but thought little of it.

As the weeks progressed, however, it became more difficult to ignore. I read On Violence, which whilst discussing the important distinctions between power, authority, violence, and force, also belittles the protests of black students in America. She worries about the introduction of modules in African American Studies which she describes as "soul courses". She then goes onto say that "in about five or ten years this ‘education' in Swahili … African Literature, and other nonexistent subjects will be interpreted as another trap of the white man to prevent Negroes from acquiring an adequate education."

This led me to reread The Origins of Totalitarianism. Here Arendt wrote that "race was the [South African] Boers' answer to the overwhelming monstrosity of Africa — a whole continent populated and overpopulated by savages." She also repeatedly refers to Africa as ‘the dark continent' and describes its inhabitants as ‘barbarians'. For Arendt, it was obvious that the people of African "[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."

This is all the more shocking given that one of Arendt's central arguments in The Origins was that European fascism grew from the racism inherent to Imperial expansionism.

The most extreme example was Reflections on Little Rock — so controversial that its original journal Commentary refused to publish it. Here Arendt considers desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. In her discussion, Arendt characterises black parents as what she called ‘social parvenus', attempting to climb the social ladder by forcing their children into white schools. She wrote that "the right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality." Arendt blatantly privileged the rights of white people over the rights of African-Americans.

Although Arendt's racism usually manifested in an anti-blackness, it occasionally spread elsewhere. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she referred to those waiting outside the courtroom as an "oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country."

Arendt's racism is important to consider, given that she is increasingly present in popular discourse. She's recently been used to offer a critical eye to the rise of right-wing populism and the ‘refugee crisis'. She's been covered in The Guardian, who reported that copies of The Origins had sold out across America following the election of Donald Trump. She has also had a beautiful illustrated book created about her life as a Jewish woman in Nazi Germany. Such a rise in popularity obliges us to look at who she was as a person and to think carefully about how we want to represent her. Whilst we might need a bigger conversation about Arendt, we also need a more complicated one — about her racism, her anti-blackness, and what that means for her philosophy.

It's very easy, particularly as a white person, to dismiss a philosopher's racism. To say that we should privilege their thought over their personality. Such a response is at best dismissive and at worst hugely damaging. People of colour are still enormously underrepresented in philosophy. Anita L Allen points out that whilst 17% of professors in America are women, only 1% are black. When first hearing about Arendt's racism, our immediate response might be to argue that her theory can be separated from her racism. But I think, particularly for Arendt, this doesn't stand up.

First, these opinions are in Arendt's published writing. We did not stumble across them in private diaries or letters. They are there for us to read in her most famous works. Second, Arendt overwhelmingly favoured using personal experience in political theory. In Action and The Pursuit of Happiness, she wrote: "incidents of living experience must remain its guideposts by which thinking soars or the depths to which it descends". We have to consider the way in which Arendt lived her life in order to understand her political theory; for better or for worse.

When you study a single scholar for such a long time it feels like you know them. And in the same way that I would be disappointed with a friend who held these views, I find myself disheartened reading her. So I'm angry with Hannah Arendt. Angry that she had these horrible opinions. Angry that she had such conviction in these ideas to put them into her books and articles. My new understanding of her racism will always affect how I read her, but I think that's right.

It's hard to let go of philosophers that you fell in love with. It's perhaps why our discipline has such a hard time discussing the racism of key figures. I'll continue to use Arendt in my work, but I'll also continue to be angry with her. I think that that's right. We have to face up to the truth about our intellectual heroes, in the end.