Race society stems from fright at humans who must not be acknowledged as fellow-men

Evidence

Slavery, however, is a very inadequate word to describe what actually happened. First of all, slavery, though it domesticated a certain part of the savage population, never got hold of all of them, so the Boers were never able to forget their first horrible fright before a species of men whom human pride and the sense of human dignity could not allow them to accept as fellow-men. This fright of something like oneself that still under no circumstances ought to be like oneself remained at the basis of slavery and became the basis for a race society. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 501

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt precisely names the psychological mechanism underlying race society: ‘fright of something like oneself that still under no circumstances ought to be like oneself’ — a transferable definitional formula.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s later Islamophobia readings on how the colonized/racialized Other is constructed as simultaneously human and inadmissible — parallels Fanon’s colonial psychology and Said’s Orientalist Other. — connects to: Race when invoked to categorize humans almost invariably operates as threat and disruption — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1842