In egalitarian societies discrimination becomes the only available means of distinction

Evidence

The situation would have been entirely different if, as in the United States, equality of condition had been taken for granted; if every member of society—from whatever stratum—had been firmly convinced that by ability and luck he might become the hero of a success story. In such a society, discrimination becomes the only means of distinction, a kind of universal law according to which groups may find themselves outside the sphere of civic, political, and economic equality. Where discrimination is not tied up with the Jewish issue only, it can become a crystallization point for a political movement that wants to solve all the natural difficulties and conflicts of a multinational country by violence, mob rule, and the sheer vulgarity of race concepts. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 192

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt’s 1950s diagnosis of American race politics — worth testing against how modern ‘colorblindness’ discourse operates as a distinction mechanism.
• SEED: An essay angle: Arendt’s ‘discrimination as the universal law of egalitarian society’ applied to meritocracy-era exclusions and class re-marking.
• XREF: connects to: For the privileged, equality can feel like discrimination — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 192; Uniform clothing in egalitarian utopias protested status stratification. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 699; No permanent human social group has ever been fully egalitarian — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 56 (+1 more)