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7 “A Much Greater Threat to Our Institutions of Higher Learning than the Student Riots”
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7 “a Much greater Threat to our institutions of Higher Learning than the student riots” Hannah Arendt wrote “reflections on Violence” in 1969, a decade afer the publication of “reflections on Little rock.” But arendt’s later reflections have not changed much from her earlier reflections. if anything, her views seem to have gotten worse. and yet arendt’s claims about Black students and higher education in On Violence (the expanded version of the 1969 “reflections”) have not received as much critique as those in “reflections on Little rock.”1 although arendt describes without criticism several uses of violence (including torture) in the private realm—oppressing others to facilitate one’s entrance into the political realm— and although she acknowledges the violence of racism, she denounces the violence in student protests and the Black Power movement. as with her analysis of anticolonial resistance, arendt is again presenting a biased critique of violence. she asserts that “violence pays,” but it pays indiscriminately for “soul” courses, instruction in swahili, and even “real” reforms (CR 176–177). Here, i examine arendt’s unwavering position on integration (in education and in residential neighborhoods), her claims about Black students’ intellectual abilities (along with the establishment of Black studies programs), and her negative representation of Black students and the Black community as violent. i challenge arendt’s wholesale characterization of Black students as academically unqualified and violent, and i bring attention to the symbolic violence of her representation of them. “our specialty—The negro Question” in personal correspondence with Mary McCarthy (december 21, 1968), arendt ruminates on what she calls “our specialty—the negro question.” arendt writes to McCarthy: “i am pretty convinced that the new trend of Black Power and antiintegration , which comes as such a shock to liberals, is a direct consequence of the integration that preceded it.”2 as long as integration was token, standards of admission were not threatened, but “the general civil rights enthusiasm led to integrating larger numbers of negroes who were not qualified.”3 according to arendt’s reasoning Black people started to become anti-integration because they realized that they were not qualified to attend white schools, but at the same time they 112 “a Much greater Threat to our institutions of Higher Learning” | 113 were seeking to lower the standards in order to gain admission to white institutions . From her perspective Black students want to take over white institutions and adjust the standards to their (lower) level, and on this basis they present “a much greater threat to our institutions of higher learning than the student riots.”4 We find similar sentiments in a 1970 interview with adelbert reif, which was translated and published in Crises of the Republic under the title “Thoughts on Politics and revolution.” again taking up the issue of integration and education, arendt explains: “The middle-class liberals have put through laws whose consequences they do not feel. They demand integration of the public schools, elimination of neighborhood schools (black children, who in large measure are simply lef to neglect, are transported in buses out of the slums into schools in predominately white neighborhoods), forced integration of neighborhoods—and send their own children to private schools and move to the suburbs, something that only those at a certain income level can afford” (CR 226). This is consistent with arendt’s position in “reflections on Little rock,” where she rejects arguments that segregation ought to be limited to private schools (while public schools are integrated) on the basis that it is unfair to poor white families. arendt asserts that private schools “would make the safeguarding of certain private rights depend upon economic status and consequently underprivilege those who were forced to send their children to public schools” (rLr 55). When asked in the same interview about american laborers’ support of the u.s. engagement in Vietnam, arendt responds by talking at length again about racial integration and “the color problem”: in the eastern and northern parts of the country integration of the negroes into the higher income groups encounters no very serious or insuperable difficulties. . . . The same integration in the middle and lower levels of middle-class, and especially among the workers . . . leads to catastrophe, and this indeed not only because the lower middle class happens to be particularly “reactionary,” but because these classes believe, not without reason, that all these reforms relating to the negro problem are being carried out at their expense. This can best be illustrated by the example of the...