Parallel to the growing academic and public popularity of Hannah Arendt’s writings in recent year, doubts about and open critique of her pronouncements concerning race have been on the rise, prompted especially by events around the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Priya Basil (2021) laments—with a hint of anachronism—about her disappointing rereading of Arendt as a racist; Ayşa Çubukçu (2020) points to the discrepancy in her treatment of 1960s rebel movements, praising (white) student revolt while condemning “black violence”; the Jerusalem Post (Frantzman 2016) calls Arendt a “white supremacist.” At the same time, local initiatives in Berlin and Leipzig advocate for renaming streets and squares dedicated to her. In his recent reconstruction of Arendt’s body of work for a general readership, Arendt scholar and pragmatist philosopher Richard J. Bernstein (2018) makes two main claims concerning what we will call “the good, the bad, and the ugly” legacies of Arendt’s thinking concerning race, scientific racism, and anti-racist activism relevant for contemporary political life that we wish to emphasize and extend in this chapter. Here, we review the continuing scholarly and popular controversies about what Arendt wrote concerning race and discrimination, chiefly in Volume II of The Origins of Totalitarianism and in her essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” which we have briefly summarized above, in Chapter 6.

Before we descend into those details, let us flag that, like Bernstein (2018: 52), we agree with Danielle S. Allen (2004) and Kathryn T. Gines (2014), among others, that Arendt did not understand “the depth and political consequences (even according to her own concept of politics) of vicious discrimination against Blacks in America.” Indeed, as was already clear at the time Bernstein wrote a few very eventful years ago, current political events make clear that race continues to be a major fault line when it comes to the interweaving of social equality and political equality that so troubled Arendt in her diagnosis of “the rise of the social,” but Arendt herself misses this in her treatment of race-based discrimination in America. All the same, Bernstein (2018: 52) continues, “if we think with Arendt against Arendt, then we discover resources in her writings for confronting the perniciousness of racism today.”