Race Thinking And Racism In Hannah Arendt's The Origins Of Totalitarianism

In Part Two of The Burden of Our Time (1951), published as The Origins of Totalitarianism in America and then reissued with additional prefaces in 1958 and 1966, Hannah Arendt utilizes her usual method of distinction making by differentiating colonialism and imperialism along with race-thinking and racism.1 In what follows I examine how these sets of distinctions are interrelated and how they influence Arendt's analysis of Africans and African Americans in the contexts of imperialism and slavery. As I outline (and when necessary summarize) Arendt's analysis, I make the following arguments: The systematic oppression that occurred during the "colonial" era in the Americas had very "imperialist" undertones and that the groundwork for race thinking and racism was laid long before what Arendt considers to be the age of imperialism—between 1884 and 1914; Her suggestion that racism is a byproduct of imperialism undermines the relationship between racism (not just race-thinking) and slavery in Europe and the Americas during and after the colonial era; Despite the fact that Arendt seeks to take a position against racism, there are still traces of racism in her own analysis.