Racism operates either as habitual status quo or as deliberate political weapon

Evidence

In contrast to the Nazis, to whom racism and antisemitism were major political weapons for the destruction of civilization and the setting up of a new body politic, racism and antisemitism are a matter of course and a natural consequence of the status quo in South Africa. They did not need Nazism in order to be born and they influenced Nazism only in an indirect way. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 530

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt distinguishes racism-as-unreflective-status-quo from racism-as-deployed-political-will — a distinction foundational for later analyses of everyday vs. ideological racism.
• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia toolkit’s distinction between informal prejudice and the state’s instrumental deployment of exclusion.