Contact with Africans tested whether Christian universalism would survive recognition of human differences.

Evidence

Ever since the European peoples made practical attempts to include all the peoples of the earth in their conception of humanity, they have been irritated by the great physical differences between themselves and the peoples they found on other continents. The eighteenth-century enthusiasm for the diversity in which the all-present identical nature of man and reason could find expression provided a rather thin cover of argument to the crucial question, whether the Christian tenet of the unity and equality of all men, based upon common descent from one original set of parents, would be kept in the hearts of men who were faced with tribes which, as far as we know, never had found by themselves any adequate expression of human reason or human passion in either cultural deeds or popular customs, and which had developed human institutions only to a very low level. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 468

Categorization

• XREF: The tension between universalist ideals and observed difference is the same mechanism later Islamophobia arguments hinge on: universalism that silently excludes.
• QUESTION: Arendt’s claim that African tribes ‘never had found’ adequate expression of reason is itself a dated Eurocentric premise worth interrogating in later readings.