[Marxism] Hannah Arendt on Brown versus Board of Education

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

www.bookforum.com
F For EFFORT
Robert S. Boynton
on the critics of Brown v. Board of Education

Marisa Bowe

On the morning of September 4, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford set off for her 
first day of classes at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. 
When the black teenager arrived, a white mob, backed by the Arkansas 
National Guard, prevented her from entering. In the days that followed, 
photographs of eckford being cursed at and spat on by the good citizens 
of Little Rock were reprinted in magazines and newspapers around the 
world. Reactions to the photos varied: Liberals were shamed; southern 
racists steeled themselves for the "massive resistance" to integration 
they had promised after the Brown v. [the Topeka, KS] Board of Education 
decision three years before; America's cold-war foes used the images as 
proof that the capitalist system was riddled with racism.

One of the most enigmatic responses came from the philosopher Hannah 
Arendt. "Reflections on Little Rock" was originally commissioned by the 
then-liberal Norman Podhoretz at the then-liberal Commentary magazine. 
While he judged the piece provocative and brilliant, the other editors 
were hostile to her thesis that educational integration was being 
mishandled, first delaying publication of the essay and then insisting 
on accompanying it with a scathing rebuttal by the philosopher Sidney 
Hook. Arendt eventually tired of Commentary's vacillations and withdrew 
the article. In the year after the Little Rock confrontation, Arkansas 
stalled its integration efforts, and in 1958, the governor, Orville 
Faubus, turned the public schools over to a private corporation, which 
promised to maintain segregation and close down the black schools. This 
confirmed Arendt's skepticism about federally enforced integration, and 
she offered the piece to Irving Howe, who published it in Dissent in the 
fall of 1959.

Written with Arendt's characteristic "Olympian authority" (as Ralph 
Ellison later called it), the Dissent version of "Reflections" began on 
an uncharacteristically personal note. She had, as always, full 
confidence in her position, but the vicious prepublication gossip in the 
two years since she wrote "Reflections" intimated the kind of response 
the piece might get. "Since what I wrote may shock good people and be 
misused by bad ones," she wrote, "I should like to make it clear that as 
a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes as for all 
oppressed or underprivileged peoples for granted and should appreciate 
it if the reader did likewise."

They didn't, of course, and Arendt was probably naive to hope that an 
apologia would assuage her critics. While clearly writing out of 
sympathy for, and identification with, the black children, her 
philosophically informed analysis was out of sync with the left-liberal, 
post-Brown consensus. Where civil-rights lawyers were redoubling their 
legal efforts in the wake of the Supreme Court's disappointing 1955 
decision (known as "Brown II," the decision decreed that integration 
proceed with "all deliberate speed"—which the South took as license to 
delay the process indefinitely), Arendt believed the basic terms of the 
conflict still needed clarification. "It is not the social custom of 
segregation that is unconstitutional, but its legal enforcement," she 
wrote in one of the essay's less inflammatory passages.

But while many of Arendt's observations were off-base (as even she later 
admitted), the questions raised by her essay anticipated some of the 
most trenchant criticisms of educational integration made on the 
occasion of Brown's fiftieth anniversary this past May. Given the 
country's dismal failure to integrate public schools, not to mention 
public life, Arendt's skepticism today seems more prescient than 
insensitive. Among her insights was that America's racial problems, as 
well as the remedies to those problems, were inscribed within larger 
political questions. "The point at stake, therefore, is not the 
well-being of the Negro population alone," she wrote, "but, at least in 
the long run, the survival of the Republic."

Arendt's imperious tone ("oppressed minorities were never the best 
judges on the order of priorities in such matters"), as well as some of 
the ideas in "Reflections on Little Rock," make for uncomfortable 
reading. Arendt argued that the choice to integrate schools first—rather 
than, say, the workplace or housing—was a mistake for the burgeoning 
civil-rights movement. Not only did it put children on the front lines 
of an ugly battle (she accused black parents of using them as proxies), 
it politicized the educational system, which she believed should be 
immune to such forces. Not only would forced integration of schools 
undercut the larger cause, it would also embitter potential allies, scar 
black children, and eventually fail, she predicted.

If this wasn't contentious enough, Arendt couched her analysis in the 
rhetoric of the rights of states (a favorite Dixiecrat formulation) to 
thwart federal intrusion. Finally she argued that—given the laws 
forbidding mixed-race marriages, which existed in twenty-nine states in 
1957—the integrationist's efforts were misdirected. "The Civil Rights 
bill did not go far enough, for it left untouched the most outrageous 
law of Southern states," she wrote, "the law which makes mixed marriage 
a criminal offense." According to Arendt, southern blacks ought to make 
the repeal of miscegenation laws, not the integration of classrooms, 
their first political priority.

As in all her work, Arendt's principal concern in "Reflections" was over 
the autonomy of what she called "the political"—the central feature of 
the tripartite framework ("the political," "the social," and "the 
private") that she articulated in The Human Condition in 1958. According 
to Arendt's schema, schools sat precisely at the juncture of the three 
realms: the private right of parents to raise children as they want; the 
social right of all to keep the company they wish; and the government's 
political right to prepare children for future duty as citizens. So 
situated, schools were the last place the movement for a just, racially 
integrated society (something she supported) should start. The goal of a 
just society, Arendt believed, was to make sure these three spheres were 
respected accordingly. Allowing discrimination where it didn't 
belong—and, conversely, prohibiting it from where it did—was for Arendt 
the true outrage.

Much to her readers' surprise, she followed her pro-forma denunciation 
of segregation with a detailed defense of the principle of 
"discrimination," in which she explained its appropriate meaning in each 
sphere. While discrimination has no place in the political sphere 
(where, for example, all are free to vote), it is appropriate in the 
private (where parents have the right to raise children as they prefer) 
and the social (where we all have the right to keep the company we 
wish). "What equality is to the body politic—its innermost 
principle—discrimination is to society," she wrote.

full: http://www.bookforum.com/boynton.html

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