Racial Common Sense as a Political Problem

Abstract I argue that Arendt’s thinking about antiblack racism in “Reflections on Little Rock” (“Reflections”) reveals Arendt’s concern that the United States, with the rise of white mobs and white lawlessness in response to Brown vs. Board of Education, was moving in the direction of democratic instability due to antiblack racism. I ground this argument with novel and unexpected interpretations of Hannah Arendt’s most widely read texts—“Reflections on Little Rock” (“Reflections”), The Origins of Totalitarianism (Origins), and The Human Condition (THC). When read together, I argue that Arendt’s thinking about antisemitism and antiblack racism highlights how racism as racial common sense becomes a particularly virulent political problem for democratic regimes when they attempt to remedy histories of racial exclusion and segregation. In the wake of these critical moments of “inclusion,” it can seem as if racism is in decline, when, in actuality, racism becomes more entrenched and perfected through quotidian interracial interactions. Also, after inclusion, racial common sense starts to guide the principle of equality in unprecedented ways. Equality begins to live a double life. It is both principled in the sense that it guides liberal political institutions in granting equal rights to differently situated citizens and conforms to dictates of racial common sense. And the second life of equality transforms racial common sense into a rule that competes with principled equality. To confront this democratic threat, I argue that democratic politics should aim to produce shared spaces for citizens to actualize equality as a lived reality.