On Prejudice and Racism
Prejudice and Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Prejudice, Racism, and Politics
in Creolizing Arendt (2024)
The exploration of prejudice through a political lens draws on Hannah Arendt's insights into the irrational nature of human judgment. The text delves into the pervasive human tendency to form prejudices based on superficial characteristics and societal stereotypes, highlighting the contradictions within our attitudes towards prejudice itself. It examines how societal progress has led to a greater awareness and rejection of prejudice while reflecting on the complexities that can arise in group dynamics and social affiliations. Ultimately, it raises important questions about the nature of judgment and the coexistence of personal biases with respectful social interactions.
Reflections on Hannah Arendt's "Reflections on Little Rock"
in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center (2020)
Hannah Arendt wrote "Reflections on Little Rock" in the Fall of 1957, occasioned by a picture in The New York Times. There were actually two pictures in the Times on September 4, 1957. It is widely assumed that Arendt refers to the photo of Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year old black girl being taunted by a white mob of adults after she was refused entrance to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. But it is as likely that she describes the other photo, which shows Dorothy Counts, another 15-year old black girl also being harassed by a mob of white students as she and a family friend walk toward Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Arendt speaks of only one photograph: "I think no one will find it easy to forget the photograph reproduced in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, showing a Negro girl, accompanied by a white friend of her father, walking away from a school, persecuted and followed into bodily proximity by a jeering and grimacing mob of youngsters." Arendt seemingly combined the two photographs in her mind's eye, describing the scene in North Carolina while attributing it to Little Rock. Originally published as: "Zur Kritik an Hannah Arendts »Reflections on Little Rock«", in "Hannah Arendt und das 20. Jahrhundert," Catalogue for a Museum Show at German Historical Museum Berlin, ed. by Monika Böll (2020).