Grayson Hunt
Hannah Arendt’s controversial 1959 essay, “Reflections on Little Rock,” is often used to illustrate Arendt’s misguided understanding of race and racism. In it, she describes race as “natural, physical characteristics”1 and black people as “visibly, and by nature unlike the others.”2 This phenotypic view of race marks blackness as a visible difference. Moreover, Arendt describes black parents and NAACP activists as social climbers who expose black children to the indignities of racism by insisting on sending them to federally mandated desegregated schools alongside racist white segregationists.3 Oppressed minorities, Arendt claims, have never been good judges of political priorities, and school desegregationists have chosen to fight for “social opportunity rather than for basic human or political rights.”4
Prior to her reflections on race in the context of federal desegregation policies in the American south, a context with which she was admittedly unfamiliar, Arendt had written on the imperialist origins of racism in European and colonial contexts in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is helpful to situate her analysis of US racism in relation to her understanding of race thinking, an ideological mechanism that helped mobilize imperialism and colonialism. Even with an understanding of her worries about the spread of mass complacency and totalitarianism in mind, however, her views on race in “Reflections” reveal an anti-black bias that is evident in Origins. Some philosophers have attributed this bias to the infamous distinctions that underwrite her political philosophy, that is, the distinctions developed in The Human Condition among the political, social, and private realms, which also are the very distinctions through which the manifestations of racism in the United States (economic and educational) are rendered social patterns rather than political injustices deserving rectification via equal rights. Other philosophers attribute this anti-black bias to a willful ignorance that was expressed through her “Olympian authority,” despite the fact she had never visited the south.5 Others yet see her bias as a direct manifestation of her philosophy of understanding, specifically her view that the space of appearance does not require the actual presence of all voices, but that plurality can be secured by representing absent others, a move that leaves her exposed to racial bias.
In this chapter, I will evaluate Arendt’s thinking on race, particularly her thinking of black people in the United States, but also in Africa, by paying special attention to works by Anne Norton, Robert Bernasconi, and Kathryn Gines, who argue that her attitudes on race cannot be separated from the rest of her political and moral thinking. This chapter engages notable evidence not only that Arendt had a poor understanding of race in the United States, but that her poor understanding was informed by her own philosophy.
Race, Race Thinking, and Racism
Arendt’s groundbreaking analysis of nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, and totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism offers many insights into how race thinking led to racism in Africa and Europe. In the chapter “Race-Thinking before Racism,” Arendt explains that racism was popular long before the Germans made it a national policy in the 1930s, but that previously, racism was actually only race opinion. Race opinions were among what Arendt called “free opinions,” beliefs that people would argue in favor of in hopes of winning public consent. These opinions were without ideology and as such could still be judged and critiqued by reason.6 Racism did, however, become ideology in Germany and elsewhere when the singular race opinion morphed into a system “strong enough to attract and persuade a majority of people and broad enough to lead them through the various experiences and situations of an average modern life.”7 Racism as ideology was able to lead people in their lives because it claimed to possess the key to history, by which Arendt meant that people were compelled by the Darwinian-inspired view of history as the natural fight of races.8 When these race opinions and race thinking developed into obligatory patterns of thought, racism became understood as fact. And although Arendt thinks that racism was strengthened as a political weapon, she does not claim that nationalism is responsible for the rise of racism. Rather, she sees imperialism as the guiding force of the rise of racism.9
Arendt’s sophisticated understanding of the rise of racism as an imperialist ideology helped illuminate the international appeal of racism, which otherwise remained obscured by the belief that Nazism was simply German nationalism. Her conceptual distinction between the political and the social, however, effectively rendered racist imperialism a problem for the wrong reasons. Part of Arendt’s critique of imperialism is that its expansionist goals brought issues of the private realm, such as economics and labor, into the social realm. It is this expanded social realm that Arendt critiques time and time again in her most famous works, including The Human Condition. Arendt makes the strict social/political distinction in order to restrict the expansion of the social after it had already come to threaten the political in modern times. The social includes economics or “housekeeping” as a public concern, which used to be a private concern. Now money is managed in a public, social manner, but it shouldn’t be considered political. She uses the Greek separation of these realms to critique modern mass society, complacency, and equality as conformism of all rather than the individualism of a few.10 But what Arendt fails to take seriously is that, as Bernasconi makes clear,
the evident problem with this conception of political freedom is, not only that it has historically been confined to the few, but also that, of its nature, it is bought at the expense of others. So, in ancient Greece, slaves, women, and, for much of the time, craftsmen were excluded from the political realm. They were denied the opportunity to realize their humanity so that others could do so.11
That racism became ideological through imperialism is unsavory to be sure, but it’s also not a properly political problem for Arendt. Racism remains a social issue of labor and economics even when it is used as a political weapon.
Arendt on Totalitarian Exceptionalism
In a move that several philosophers would later criticize and hold up as the shining example of how Arendt’s social/political distinction facilitates an anti-black bias, Arendt maintains that only with the “new global political situation” of totalitarianism could the denial of the right to have rights, the right to action, be taken away. In other words, it wasn’t until the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s that citizens could be rendered stateless and robbed of personhood. But where does slavery fit into this account?
In her section on imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt explains that to be rightless is to be stateless, the calamity of which is “not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . . but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.”12 For Arendt, not belonging to any community means several things: not that a group is oppressed, but that no one wants to oppress them, and that they are deprived not of the right to freedom, but the right to action and opinion.13 Before Jewish people became stateless under totalitarianism, Arendt claims that human rights were a “general characteristic of the human condition which no tyrant could take away” and that even in slavery, slaves still belonged to some kind of human community because their labor was needed, and this fact kept slaves within the pale of humanity.14 But what exactly does community mean in the context of slavery? Did such communities have the right to action and opinion? Certainly not, if a condition for being human and subsequently being political requires that one be free from the necessities of life. As Bernasconi makes clear, Arendt prizes ancient Greek political life, a life in which philosophy and politics are dependent on the enslavement of others:
If to be human is to disclose oneself in the public sphere, and if that possibility is itself dependent on one’s being liberated from the necessities imposed by the life-cycle, then it would seem that one of the preconditions of being human is the inhumanity of exploiting the labor of others. In Greece this primarily took the form of slavery. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that the question of slavery underlies all political thought deriving from the Greeks, and that the practice of slavery—or its surrogates—has dominated the practice of politics insofar as it provides the condition of the possibility of politics.15
If slaves weren’t able to enter the space of appearance and were permitted neither to act nor to have opinions, it’s unclear on what grounds these slaves can be thought to have rights. What Bernasconi makes clear is that Arendt believed that the plight of Jewish people under totalitarianism was a novel political harm.
In On Revolution, Arendt admits that “abject and degrading misery was present everywhere in the form of slavery and Negro labor,” but again, because poverty for Arendt is not a properly political issue since the distribution of goods is an extension of oikos, the home, and the private sphere, and when done publicly only becomes social, not political.16 She also believes the United States never suffered from poverty in the way Europe did (central claims made throughout On Revolution), and she does not consider slavery as an event that amounts to the loss of community, the space of appearance, and the capacity for self-disclosure through a ction and opinion.
Arendt believes that it is sheer coincidence that the United States struggles with the “color problem” because she believes that racism is a global ideology resulting from imperialism, “the great crime in which America was never involved.”17 Why does Arendt believe that the United States, a country founded by settler colonialism and by the abduction and enslavement of Africans, was never involved in imperialism, rather than a direct product of it? In any case, it is not clear that Arendt would have had a more sympathetic understanding of black people even if she did believe that racism in the United States was a product of imperialist expansion. When Arendt analyzed imperialist racism in Africa (e.g., Boer settlements and the enslavement of black Africans), she demonstrated sympathy for the white Boers and described the enslaved black people as savages.18 While some philosophers have defended Arendt as merely representing (not avowing) the racist attitudes of the Boers, others have criticized her apparent sympathy with the white racists while ignoring the humanity of black Africans and their communities. Bernasconi, referring to Arendt’s refusal to see slavery as a political issue, remarks:
It is far from clear that she was right to think that the modern experience of statelessness revealed something entirely new. What could be more contrary to the idea of human rights, the idea of rights due to one by virtue of nothing else than the fact of one’s birth, than the institution of slavery, whereby one is born the property of one’s mother’s master? Was it because in her terms statelessness was a purely political issue, whereas slavery had a connection with the private realm? Or was it also in part because she went too far in trying to make sense of European racial prejudices, as she did in her account of the role of anti-Black racism in establishing the imperialist policies adopted by Whites in Africa?19
Bernasconi suggests that Arendt’s failure to recognize slavery as a form of political statelessness may be the result of not only her problematic conceptual distinctions of private, social, and political but also her inability to see the political harm of slavery may result from a sympathy she developed with the Boers that prevented her from seeing the plight of black people in Africa and the United States.
Anti-black Bias in “Reflections on Little Rock”
Arendt’s remarks in “Reflections on Little Rock” shouldn’t be surprising given her conceptual distinctions that place education, poverty, and the economy with the realm of the social, rather than the political realm of equality. For Arendt, the issue more important than school integration relates to anti-miscegenation laws because the right to marry whomever one chooses is a more basic right than the right to attend school wherever one wishes.
The right to marry who[m]ever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which “the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race” are minor indeed.20
Why would Arendt critique anti-miscegenation laws, but not desegregation laws? Because the right to marry whomever one pleases is a basic private right to love whomever one loves (according to the private principle of exclusion). Education is a social matter for Arendt and therefore governed by the right to free association (a right which in this case she seems only to afford to racist white parents).
To be sure, Arendt does think that political equality for citizens matters, but she has a somewhat libertarian view of how it should be attained, and what institutions and rights should be included in political equality. Political equality for all American citizens should not be secured by overriding the social right to freely associate with whomever one wishes. As people leave their private homes in order to work and pursue happiness, they enter the social realm in which we find the right to free association is governed by the so-called law of “like attracts like.”21 She writes, seemingly without thinking of the consequences for oppressed people, “If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so; just as I see no reason why other resorts not cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews while on a holiday.”22 Of course, some services are public, and as such they need to be made equally available to all citizens, as is the case with buses, train cars, and train stations, as well as hotels and restaurants in business districts. She writes, “Whether privately or publicly owned, [these] are in fact public services that everyone needs in order to pursue his business and lead his life.”23 It may seem odd that Arendt did not include public education as a public service needed to lead one’s life. But the political right to education (the federal law that requires all children to attend school) is guided by equality only in the sense that all students are equally obliged to attend; it does not include the right to attend whatever school one chooses. The right to freely associate is a social right to discriminate, not a political right to equality.
Why does Arendt defend the social right to discriminate as a way to protect a parent’s right to send his or her child to a segregated school? There are two reasons provided in her “Little Rock” essay. The first is because her distinctions between political and social are motivated by her fear of mass conformism. For plurality to exist in the public sphere, social conformism needs to be avoided. The second reason has to do with the rights she assigns to the private realm. Generally mandated within the four walls of the home, the private realm is governed by the principle of exclusion: parents can choose whom to allow into their home and what values to teach their children. This realm also seems to protect the parents’ right to send their children to segregated schools. But again, notice that these social and private rights provide an advantage for white parents because the “separate but equal” segregation policies left white schools with better schools than poor black school zones.
As I mentioned in the introduction, even emancipated black people, the very subject of “Reflections on Little Rock,” have trouble appearing in public as political actors. Arendt attributes this difficulty to skin color, an attribute that is in fact phenotypically varied and diverse, but which for Arendt is fixed and apparent as different. Arendt believes that skin color appears prior to any speech or action:
The Negroes’ visibility is unalterable and permanent. This is not a trivial matter. In the public realm, where nothing counts that cannot make itself seen and heard, visibility and audibility are of prime importance. To argue that they are merely exterior is to beg the question. For it is precisely appearances that “appear” in “public” and inner qualities, gifts of heart or mind are political only to the extent that their owner wishes to expose them in public, to place them in the limelight of the market place.24
But does a person make their outwardly visible characteristics appear? A black person’s race, which for Arendt is synonymous with skin color, appears in public as an unalterable fact, as a mere givenness that cannot be ignored or overlooked. It is surprising that Arendt viewed race as a “natural, physical characteristic” when we consider that she believed racism as ideology was based on the faulty view that the races were naturally separate.25
She seems to understand that viewing a person as mere givenness is dangerous and harmful. She writes,
If a Negro in a white community is considered Negro and nothing else, he loses along with his right to equality that freedom of action which is specifically human; all his deeds are now explained as “necessary” consequences of some “Negro” qualities; he has become some specimen of an animal species, called man.26
She continues, “The great danger arising from the existence of people forced to live outside the common world is that they are thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation.”27 Reducing people to an immutable, natural characteristic robs them of their particularity and personality. But this is exactly how Arendt describes Africans in Origins.
Civil Disobedience as a Social Right
But what about Arendt’s “Reflections on Civil Disobedience”? Gines’s work focuses on “Reflections on Little Rock,” but also finds problematic discussions of race across all her major works. It is worth examining an article that Arendt published in The New Yorker on September 12, 1970, in contrast to her views expressed eleven years earlier in “Reflections on Little Rock.” Unlike “Reflections on Little Rock,” Arendt appears to champion black leaders who used civil disobedience as a way toward a stronger democracy. Arendt begins her reflections by distinguishing civil disobedience as something public, not private like one’s individual moral conscience. Arendt believed that conscientious objection was an individual, and therefore subjective, judgment brought about through a conversation (or intercourse, as she calls it) between myself and me. Our conscience has to do with what we can live with, and it functions to set up negative, rather than positive, freedoms. My conscience tells me not to do something because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did something. Conscience is not, therefore, robustly moral. It’s not about making the world better or more just. Conscience is about washing one’s hands of the injustice. She uses Henry David Thoreau’s defiance to make the point. Thoreau, an abolitionist and philosopher, spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax to a government that permitted slavery. One may see Thoreau’s act as one of civil disobedience, since he broke what he considered an unjust law and paid the price. But Arendt’s distinction between individual conscience and group actions such as civil disobedience is crucial. Her reflection on civil disobedience ends with the view that civil disobedience is the newest iteration of voluntary association, a social right that had not yet found a home within the American legal system, even though it was already certainly in the spirit of American law. Whereas Arendt sees civil disobedience as a new action different from past iterations of conscientious objection, Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, made no such distinction, and furthermore, King undoubtedly saw civil disobedience as an essentially political act, not a social one.
But can this distinction undo the harm done in “Reflections on Little Rock” where she calls black parents and desegregationists social climbers who aren’t the best judges of what the black liberation movement needs? By the end of her 1970 article, it’s clear that even civil disobedience, the kind practiced, popularized, and defended by Martin Luther King, Jr., remains a social, not a political act. In fact, it has become the newest form of free association, a social right not easily protected within the American legal system, even though it’s in “in the spirit of American Law,” Arendt writes.28 Again, the organizing efforts of black activists to appear in the political realm is relegated to the realm of the social.
Arendt’s Misrepresentational Thinking
Thus far I have discussed how Arendt’s political philosophy can be seen as responsible in part for an anti-black bias that permeates her work on race. But feminist philosophers have argued that Arendt’s moral philosophy, notably her concept of understanding, is to blame. These philosophers argue that Arendt espouses a lack of imagination when it comes to the actual humanity of black people. She cannot imagine herself as a person of color, and people of color are depicted as more bodily and therefore less political, that is, as social animals, than their white counterparts.
Although critiques of Arendt’s analysis of black Africans and African Americans is not new, her treatment of anti-black racism and African Americans has come under renewed scrutiny in the work of Gines. Her Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question takes up a different approach that, for the first time, attempts to understand Arendt’s problematic claims about race and racism in the United States as emblematic of her theory of understanding. To posit the origin of what some call Arendt’s anti-black racism on her theory of understanding, rather than on her lack of understanding, as Norton does, or on her problematic distinction between the social and political, as Bernasconi does, Gines effectively doubles-down on the charge that Arendt held anti-black views.
Gines argues that Arendt’s Kantian philosophy of understanding supports, and indeed enables, her anti-black views. This unexplored territory of critique, initiated by Gines, centers around a passage in Arendt’s Between Past and Future. It is worth quoting at length in order to capture the spirit of Arendt’s political theory and its underlying theory of judgment. It is here that Gines locates Arendt’s erasure of black experience and the theoretical framework that enables that erasure. Arendt writes:
Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusion, my opinion. (It is this capacity for an “enlarged mentality” that enables [people] to judge; as such, it was discovered by Kant in the first part of his Critique of Judgment, though he did not recognize the political and moral implications of his discovery.) The very process of opinion formation is determined by those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s own private interests. . . . I remain in this world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the representative of everybody else.29
There are several things to note in this passage, especially including the unsavory implications for being included and appearing in politics. (1) Political thinking represents those who are absent; (2) representative thinking does not adopt a different perspective, but of thinking where one is not; (3) representative thinking engages how one would “feel and think” if one were in another position; (4) this enlarged mentality authorizes judgment; and (5) it is based on a disinterested imagination (the liberation from one’s own private interests) that enables one to be a representative of everyone else.
Arendt is silent about those whose standpoints are absent and why. But certainly Arendt was aware that race thinking has historically rendered some points of view more salient than others (see her work on race thinking and racism discussed earlier). Moreover, this tendency to make salient the values and ideas of those in political power in the age of imperialism also seems to have a feedback effect on Arendt herself. Although she understands how racial ideologies get established (and disavows their credibility), she nonetheless privileges the dominant standpoint in her own analyses of racism in Africa and the United States. In “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” Anne Norton calls Arendt to task for rendering the actions and attitudes of a black desegregationist mother politically unintelligible:
In asking “What would I do if I were a Negro mother?” Arendt ignores the constitutional power not only of material circumstances, but of cultural constructions of race. She takes the body as a site, a vessel, a set of circumstances, into which she can inject a mind that will be unaltered by this moral metempsychosis. Because she regards the body as natural, and thus beyond the reach of politics, she fails to consider how the political construction of race can reach in to touch the mind. . . . The question “What would I do if I were a Negro mother?” makes a public question a private one.30
The black mother’s decisions, thoughts, and feelings are never engaged. This is in part due to Arendt’s reading of black people as a part of nature, a view developed in Origins, but also due to the fact that she considers much of the civil rights movement to be about social, and not political access. Simply put, Arendt has difficulty attributing political thoughts and motivations to African Americans.
Norton’s essay also analyses Arendt’s empathy for white settlers in Africa. Norton argues that Arendt’s account of the Boer settlers in Africa in Origins as a paradigm of imperialist racism leading to a program of slavery shows sympathy with the white racists in their fear of “Black savages.”31 Arendt uncritically adopts Joseph Conrad’s racist novel Heart of Darkness as a representation of Africans, while doing extraordinary work to understand the inner thoughts and feelings of Boer settlers who enslaved black Africans. As Norton puts it, “Arendt put herself in the minds and circumstances of the Boer. She did not attempt to put herself in the minds and circumstances of the African. Arendt gave voice to the Boer. She left the African silent.”32
Arendt is aware that a person can refuse to engage in this “enlarged mentality,” and can instead form an opinion that only takes into account the interests of the group to which that person belongs. Nothing is more common than this refusal to engage in disinterested representative thinking when forming a political opinion. Nonetheless, Arendt ensures us that the “very quality of opinion, as of a judgment, depends upon the degree of its impartiality.”33 But this impartiality is skewed in the case of “Reflections on Little Rock” and elsewhere by the fact that Arendt represents the “Negro question” as a Negro problem instead of a white problem. Racism, while first critiqued by Arendt as an ideology based on opinions that had become understood as fact, seems to have sli pped into her own misunderstanding of black people, as evidenced by her adoption of the Boers’ and white segregationists’ attitudes in Origins and “Reflections on Little Rock,” respectively. In Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, Kathryn Gines notes, “Although Arendt assumes that she is writing from the position of a disinterested or unbiased outsider representing standpoints that are absent, the position she occupies and represents in the Little Rock essay is actually the position of white racists.”34 Arendt’s theory of understanding and its representational thinking appears to require a type of epistemic arrogance that effectively erases plurality, the very condition of politics. For this reason, Gines holds up Arendt’s analysis in “Reflections on Little Rock” as an example of “exclusive representative thinking.”35
Gines concludes by saying, “Arendt’s representation of the Negro question as a Negro problem rather than a white problem is an indication of her poor judgment.”36 Gines’s work reveals not only that Arendt practiced poor judgment but also how her concept of judgment is misguided on its own terms. Only those included within the political are represented, and only those imagining have representative power. Black activism cannot enter into the space of appearance, the space of politics.
Notes
1 Arendt waivers on whether race is synonymous with phenotype. It seems clear that in “Reflections” Arendt believes that the “Color Problem” is caused by the inability of American equality to equalize “what by nature and origin is different.” And yet, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is less clear on whether she thinks racism is a natural effect of race. Seven years before she wrote her “Reflections,” she analyzed the shift from what she called race thinking to racism in The Origins of Totalitarianism. There, she claims that racism based on the view that race is organic is a fabrication of race thinking that had become ideology (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973], 166). She says that “the organic doctrine of a history for which ‘every race is a separate, complete whole’ was invented by men who needed ideological definitions of national unity as a substitute for political nationhood” (Ibid.). These views lend themselves to a view of race that is politically and socially constructed. Not only that, Arendt is able to see that this view of race as natural is dangerous, for when people are understood as only being this so-called natural characteristic, they are seen as mere givenness and can subsequently be denied the right to action (Ibid., 296). All of this would suggest that Arendt understood all too well how racism as ideology operated in the oppression of black people in the United States under slavery. For Arendt, racism vacillates between being a politically produced ideology and a natural effect of biological fact.
2 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 48.
3 Ibid., 46, 50.
4 Ibid., 46.
5 For her admission that she avoided visiting the US south, see the Preliminary Remarks in “Reflections on Little Rock.” Ralph Ellison referred to Arendt’s “Olympian Authority” in “The World and Jug,” a reference brought to my attention by Kathryn Gines’s Introduction in Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 5.
6 Arendt, Origins, 158.
7 Ibid., 159.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 160–61.
10 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 41.
11 Robert Bernasconi, “The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions,” Research in Phenomenology 26, no. 1 (1996): 6.
12 Arendt, Origins, 295.
13 Ibid., 296.
14 Ibid., 297.
15 Bernasconi, “The Double Face,” 6.
16 Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2006), 65.
17 Ibid., 46.
18 See “Race and Bureaucracy,” notably the section one, “The Phantom World of the Dark Continent,” in Origins.
19 Bernasconi, “The Double Face,” 6.
20 Arendt, “Reflections,” 49.
21 Ibid., 51.
22 Ibid., 52.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 47.
25 Ibid., 48.
26 Arendt, Origins, 301–2.
27 Ibid., 302.
28 Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1970), 49–102, 99.
29 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 107.
30 Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 1995), 258.
31 Ibid., 253; Arendt, Origins, 191.
32 Norton, “Heart of Darkness,” 253.
33 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2006), 223–59, 237.
34 Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, 127.
35 Ibid., 126.
36 Ibid., 129.