From Equality to Privilege: Hannah Arendt as a Critic of White Citizenship

• In Event: Fighting against White Supremacy

Abstract

This paper incorporates Hannah Arendt’s critique of Zionism into her treatments of European Jewish emancipation and American politics to recover the trenchant critique of herrenvolk politics generally and ideals of White citizenship specifically in her theory. I argue that White citizenship is an unmentioned throughline that structures a transnational triangle between Arendt’s accounts of these three locales. Arendt’s account illuminates how White citizenship enables dominant groups to ignore the political claims made on them by individuals from marginalized communities—thus obstructing the claim-making she positions as central to democratic politics. As a result, White citizenship undermines the possibility of a shared, pluralistic politics and allows dominant groups to justify the exclusion, expulsion, or annihilation of others.

Unlike theorists who emphasize a co-constitutive relationship between privilege and equality in herrenvolk contexts, Arendt traces how ideals of White citizenship undermine political equality for both dominant and subordinated groups. She shows how these ideals subvert the limited universality of the rule of law guaranteed by the state. Her theory illuminates how White citizenship, when sustained through the reaffirmation of founding-era constitutional exclusions, can impede political claim-making. Without the rule of law and this claim-making, what is left is simply a politics of White privilege—which, as Arendt shows, is not a politics at all.

As a result, I argue that Arendt’s theory provides an alternative normative framework for critiquing White citizenship. This is one that emphasizes how White citizenship is incompatible with any notion of political equality. This paper neither excuses nor minimizes the racism prevalent in Arendt’s writings. Rather, I argue that her theory remains a critical instrument for disrupting narratives of racialized, national homogeneity and sovereignty. By tracing the transnational conceptual ties between the US, Europe, and Israel/Palestine in her theory, this paper sheds light on the relationship between freedom, citizenship, and White supremacy across these three locales—and the destructive implications of this relationship for all.

Author

• Miko Nathaniel Zeldes-Roth, University of Toronto