The White Mob, (In) Equality Before the Law, and Racial Common Sense: A Critical Race Reading of the Negro Question in “Reflections on Little Rock”

• Author: Ainsley LeSure
• Published date: 01 February 2021
• Date: 01 February 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720943211
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720943211

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(1) 3 –27

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720943211

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Article

The White Mob, (In)

Equality Before the Law,

and Racial Common

Sense: A Critical Race

Reading of the Negro

Question in “Reflections

on Little Rock”

Ainsley LeSure1

Abstract

This article argues that Hannah Arendt’s controversial essay “Reflections

on Little Rock,” when situated within her analysis of Jewish assimilation,

has an astute insight: racial integration and the decrease of the racial gaps in

material inequality, without taking seriously the political project of building

a world in common, only intensify racism in racist polities. This occurs

because attempts to extend formal equality to the racially dominated give

rise to the rule of racial common sense, a result of a clash between the

political structures of equality and the racial inequality practiced in quotidian

interracial exchanges occurring in civil society. Though Arendt’s work on

racism echoes criticisms of racial integration leveled by racial realist and

pessimistic accounts of the Civil Rights struggle, her work points to a more

expansive practice of “the political” that calls for the institutional (re)design

of formal politics as an important strategy against racism.

Keywords

Hannah Arendt, Little Rock, racism, racial equality, law, white mob

1Africana Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Ainsley LeSure, Africana Studies, Brown University, 155 Angell Street, Providence, RI 02912,

USA.

Email: ainsley_lesure@brown.edu

943211PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720943211Political TheoryLeSure

research-article2020

4 Political Theory 49(1)

Introduction

“Reflections on Little Rock” (“Reflections”) is a controversial essay that has

only grown in infamy as scholars have interrogated the significance of

Hannah Arendt’s condemnable views about race in her normative political

theory.1 Scholars find that persistent antiblack racism pervades her work and

is on display in “Reflections.”2 She presumes the intellectual inferiority of

Black students; she charges Black parents with cowardice, arguing that they

failed to protect their children by sending their children, rather than them-

selves, to the front lines of the public fight for school desegregation.3 Yet, her

claim that the fight for school desegregation, forged by the then-nascent civil

rights movement, involved Black parents and their children in “an affair of

social climbing” rather than a genuine effort toward political equality, has

been deemed an especially egregious failure in her judgment. With this judg-

ment, Arendt is read as accusing the NAACP of inappropriately using politi-

cal institutions, like the courts, to advance the social and economic interests

of Black Americans. Scholars also see reflected in this charge her untenable

distinction between the social and political, developed in The Human

Condition (THC), where she concludes that so-called social issues—like the

economic and social standing of citizens or the social customs that organize

racial interactions in public space—have no bearing on the political standing

of citizens.4

In this article, I demonstrate that Arendt’s claim in “Reflections” that the

fight for school desegregation involved Black parents and their children in

“an affair of social climbing” is more complicated than a simple rebuke of the

NAACP’s legal strategy to achieve racial equality. When read with an eye

toward understanding Arendt’s concern about the rise of the white mob in

response to the enforcement of Brown v. The Board of Education (Brown),

Arendt’s characterization of the Black community in “Reflections” mirrors

less her pathological characterizations of Black students and Black residents

in her 1969 characterization of the Negro question. And it resembles more her

account of the Jewish people amidst their anti-Semitic brethren in eighteenth-

and nineteenth-century Europe. From this vantage, Arendt’s critique of

Brown in “Reflections” is indicative of a larger concern within her work

about the threat racial common sense poses to the legitimacy of equality and

the stability of the modern liberal political order.

By racial common sense, I mean to capture Arendt’s description of a long

process of racialization, documented in her analysis of the Jewish question,

that reduces the lived reality of the Jewish people into a racial category that

signifies “an agglomeration of characteristics that are universally ‘evil’ and,

although observable in other people,” always deemed a possession of the