Race concepts only gained political force when colonial needs adopted them

Evidence

No doubt these concepts of the socially underprivileged could have gone far, but they would have had little significance in European politics had they not met with real political necessities when, after the scramble for Africa, they could be adapted to political purposes. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 252

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Foundations Module 2: race-thinking becomes politically potent only when it meets material political needs — a mechanism to carry into the Islamophobia toolkit. — connects to: Ideas matter only as they strengthen the race and subjugate others; Race as a configuration dates only from the late eighteenth century; Race-as-inferiority toward Arabs and Muslims emerged only with nineteenth-century colonial power — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 142