Race-thinking sharpened existing conflicts but never created political categories

Evidence

What we have followed so far is the story of an opinion in which we see only now, after all the terrible experiences of our times, the first dawn of racism. But although racism has revived elements of race-thinking in every country, it is not the history of an idea endowed by some “immanent logic” with which we were concerned. Race-thinking was a source of convenient arguments for varying political conflicts, but it never possessed any kind of monopoly over the political life of the respective nations; it sharpened and exploited existing conflicting interests or existing political problems, but it never created new conflicts or produced new categories of political thinking. Racism sprang from experiences and political constellations which were still unknown and would have been utterly strange even to such devoted defenders of “race” as Gobineau or Disraeli. There is an abyss between the men cf brilliant and facile conceptions and men of brutal deeds and active bestiality which no intellectual explanation is able to bridge. It is highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth century, if the “scramble for Africa” and the new era of imperialism had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences. Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible “explanation” and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 482

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the distinction between race-thinking as polite opinion and racism as imperialist doctrine — a scaffolding distinction later Islamophobia readings will need when separating prejudice from structural exclusion.
• DEEPTHINKING: The core conceptual axis of the whole chapter: race-thinking is epiphenomenal, racism is a constitutive product of imperialism, and an unbridgeable abyss separates idea from deed.