Hannah Arendt has been criticized for her “blindness” to the sociopolitical significance of race and racism in the West, most notably, in her “Reflections on Little Rock.” I consider three prominent explanations for Arendt's wrongheaded conclusions in “Reflections.” First, the “category interpretation” presents Arendt's conclusions as resulting from her rigid application of philosophical categories—the public, the private, and the social—to events in Little Rock. Second, the “racial prejudice interpretation” presents Arendt's conclusions as resulting from her anti-black racism and her dismissal (...) of the political strivings of African Americans. Third, the “cultural interpretation” presents Arendt's conclusions as resulting from her misunderstanding of the sociopolitical significance of race and racism in the United States. Each of these interpretations advances our understanding of Arendt's oversights, but I contend that they do not go far enough. I argue that white ignorance constitutes a fundamental epistemic error in Arendt's work and, as such, strengthens current explanations of Arendt's “blindness” to the history and political strivings of African Americans. If accepted, my analysis—following Charles Mills's work on white ignorance—calls for increased theoretical work on epistemologies of ignorance, their function in Western political philosophy, and the affect of white ignorance on cognizers in American society. (shrink)

In recent years, a growing number of scholars have accused Arendt of anti-Black racism. Some of these criticisms can be traced to certain passages in her essay On Violence about black radicals making what she believed to be unreasonable curriculum demands, namely the establishment of Black Studies programs. The purpose of this paper is to contextualize these controversial passages within her deeply anti-modern thinking about the role of higher education in society. While her arguments remain troubling, when read along with (...) the critical perspectives of Max Weber and Karl Jaspers, it becomes clear that her essential criticism had mostly to do with the transformation of the university into a capitalist enterprise, where students had become customers essentially seeking glorified vocational degrees. For Arendt, the university should not be a means of employment or another branch of the US military, as it had so become. It was a space where one could escape the public realm and discover a kind of freedom, the life of the mind. (shrink)