Social acceptance of a group becomes self-conscious and conditional once civil equality arrives.

Evidence

With the early idyll of a mixed society something disappeared which was never, in any other country and at any other time, to return. Never again did any social group accept Jews with a free mind and heart. It would be friendly with Jews either because it was excited by its own daring and “wickedness” or as a protest against making pariahs of fellow-citizens. But social pariahs the Jews did become wherever they had ceased to be political and civil outcasts. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 209

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt’s counterintuitive inversion — emancipation from political/civil exclusion produced social pariahdom rather than ending it — is worth holding against the assumption that formal equality precedes social acceptance.