Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question

Conclusion: The Role of Judgment in Arendt’s Approach to the Negro Question

Conclusion The Role of Judgment in Arendt’s Approach to the Negro Question throughout this book i have made several arguments. i argued that arendt sees the negro question as a negro problem rather than a white problem, meaning that arendt frames the issues of slavery, segregation, and colonialism/imperialism in a way that presents Black persons as the problem rather than situating white people’s anti-Black racism as the problem (as did richard Wright, James Baldwin , ralph ellison, and gunnar Myrdal, for example). i also argued that arendt does not constructively connect her analysis of the Jewish question to her analysis of the negro question, even though the former has implications for the latter. For example, arendt does not connect her childhood experience with antisemitism and the ways her mother equipped her to confront antisemitism with Black children’s experiences of anti-Black racism and Black parents’ abilities to do for their children what arendt’s mother did for her. instead she chooses to view Black parents as social parvenus who allowed their children to integrate white schools for upward social mobility. Likewise, while arendt puts her arguments for the formation of a Jewish army in political terms and claims that the armed uprisings in the Warsaw ghetto transformed people broken in body and spirit into political actors fighting for the freedom of Jews, she does not apply this analysis to uprisings staged by colonized resisters. she is keenly aware of the violent oppression in the colonial system (which she calls “imperialism”) but criticizes Fanon and sartre as theorists glorifying violence for the sake of violence. additionally, although arendt insists that antisemitism and Jew hatred are political, she holds that most forms of anti-Black racial oppression are private and at times social issues , but not specifically political problems. With this in mind, i have also argued that arendt’s description of the Jewish question as political and the negro question as private or social raises doubts about her criteria for what is political, private, or social. Her theoretical framework dividing up the political, the private, and the social guides her analysis of the negro question in a way that undermines her understanding of and judgments about it. Consequently, arendt’s approach to the negro question as a private or social issue prevents her from recognizing that anti-Black racism (like Jew hatred) is a political phenomenon. i want to connect these broader arguments 123 124 | Conclusion concerning arendt and the negro question to her analysis of judgment and representational thinking, which inhibits rather than enhances her understanding of this question. My starting point is arendt’s Kantian (or Kant-influenced) conceptualization of judgment and representational thinking. Judgment involves being in public space, communicating one’s opinions, reaching agreement with others, and considering other viewpoints to move beyond private opinions and interests. While arendt imagines that she has many standpoints present in her mind and that she thinks in the place of absent others, instead she represents the views only of those allowed in the public realm while misrepresenting (or not making present at all) the views of those confined to the private or social realms. The limitations of the concepts of judgment and representative thinking are evident in arendt’s representation of african americans and africans across her political writings. rather than representing and making present the absent standpoints of the oppressed , arendt occupies and represents the standpoints of those already present in the public realm, the oppressors. a Political activity: “to Think in the Place of everybody else” in “The Crisis in Culture,” arendt uses immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason to show that the faculty of judgment implies political rather than merely theoretical activity.1 she then turns to Kant’s Critique of Judgment to explore representational thinking or enlarged mentality, that is, the ability to “think in the place of everybody else” (BPF 219). For arendt, “The power of judgment rests on potential agreement with others,” or reaching agreement through communication with others in public/political space (220).2 This judgment “must liberate itself from ‘the subjective private conditions’” and be thought about in anticipation of communication and potential agreement with others (ibid.). already arendt has situated this concept into her framework of the political (reaching agreement with others in public space) and the private (moving beyond private opinions that are not valid in the public realm). according to arendt, “Judgment may be one of the fundamental abilities of man as a political...