Modern equality, by removing mediating conditions, makes race relations intractably cruel

Evidence

The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions. And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modern race relations so difficult, for there we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable change of conditions can become less conspicuous. It is because equality demands that I recognize each and every individual as my equal, that the conflicts between different groups, which for reasons of their own are reluctant to grant each other this basic equality, take on such terribly cruel forms. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 189

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt says natural differences ‘by no conceivable change of conditions can become less conspicuous’ — is this a biological-essentialist slide worth pressing on in the field’s terms, or strictly about social visibility?
• XREF: Connects to race-thinking/statelessness later in the book and to the construction of the Other; the recognition-demand mechanism parallels Fanon’s dialectic of recognition.