Race and bureaucracy are imperialism’s two paired ruling devices

Evidence

OF THE TWO main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt, and India; the former was originally the barely conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened, whereas the latter was a consequence of that administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt to be hopelessly their inferiors and at the same time in need of their special protection. Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist, and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellowman and no people for another people. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 534

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s paired definitions — race as escape into irresponsibility, bureaucracy as unbearable responsibility — the chapter’s thesis statement.
• SEED: The race/bureaucracy pairing maps cleanly onto how ‘Muslim’ as race and security bureaucracy as administration dovetail in modern Islamophobia — a potential essay angle.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 534
• XREF: connects to: Imperial agents are the counterpart to bureaucratic Orientalist institutions; Bureaucracy attracted the best intelligentsia while race attracted the worst; Racism and bureaucracy developed separately before combining for total destruction — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 487 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Imperialism normalized unprecedented hybrid and race-based arrangements. #corroborates (0.85)
• Colonial racism generalized aristocratic superiority to justify empire and shore up domestic class rule #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 571
• Racialization shifts with the political interests of those in power #expands (0.80) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 86
• Capitalism conserving non-capitalist modes produces racial and colonial ideologies. #complicates (0.75)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital #expands (0.75)