Following the slaughter of millions in Europe and Russia during WWII Hanna Arendt wrote about the banality of Evil in her piece Eichmann In Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil[1]. The book focuses on an examination, by Arendt, of the 1961 Trial of Adolph Eichmann which took place in Israel after Eichmann was extradited from Argentina. A key point here is the choice of word – banal – to describe the type of Evil that Arendt, a Jewish woman, believed the Nazi’s and Eichmann himself representing. At once she is pointing out how insidious evil is – it doesn’t look like a monster with horns or fangs, and how accepted evil is in society that people largely fail to act to stop the Jewish Holocaust until it is too late.
Arendt is particularly concerned with anti-Semitism and the fallout post-WWII and she does link it to an idea that Jews are a distinct race[2], but not white supremacy. This is telling in that Anti-Semitism has come to stand for anti-Jewish, but it is itself a misapplied term because Semites are also Arabs, not exclusively Jewish people. Also, this signals some missed opportunities by Arendt to link banal evil to white supremacy.
In the past year, the topic of banal evil and Arendt has been used to explain the 45th president[3], the recent shooting of Republicans at a baseball practice[4] and rape culture in the U.S.[5]. Many have discussed the brilliance of Arendt’s critique aided by her situated understanding, but have overlooked that the crucial connection to white supremacist ideology except for a few words in passing[6]. This connection, however, works well to explain current trends in the U.S. in which neo-Nazis are out and proud and willing to be photographed[7], black people are murdered for being black (often by police who are readily exonerated), and Muslims are targeted and murdered for being Muslim[8]. Missing from much of the discussion of these atrocities is a discussion of white supremacy, an ideology that Hitler borrowed from scientists and the U.S. government’s Jim Crow system.
Today there are neo-Nazis in the White House (the 45th president himself, his aides Bannon, Miller, Gorka[9]) who are working hard to “Make America Great Again” – a code for making U.S. white again. Many are asking how this happened, especially white people who had been declaring for more than a decade that “racism is over.” I argue here that the banality of white supremacy has worked to render racism invisible from those who benefit from the system. Racism is actively being normalized with the renewed visibility of white supremacist practices; and that if we pay attention to black voices in the U.S., we would know this has always been a problem rather than is now a resurgence.
Plain Vanilla Monsters
Scanning the current public social arena in the U.S. highlights what black and brown people have never been allowed to forget – that racism is still active as an everyday practice. While the end of the 90’s saw overt white supremacists practices rejected by the mainstream media, professional workplaces, and people in public spaces, the second half of the first quarter of the 21st century saw racism everywhere in both overt and covert forms.
It is one thing to ferret out criminals and murderers from their hiding places, and it is another thing to find them prominent and flourishing in the public realm – to encounter innumerable men in the federal and state administrations and, generally, in public office whose careers had bloomed under the Hitler regime[10].
Arendt’s well-referenced piece on the Eichmann trial was fueled in part by the media images circulated at the time.
Despite being contained within a windowed box during the trial,[11] suggesting he is a dangerous man, Eichmann, looks more like a high school teacher or a businessman, and less like a leading organizer of the attempted extermination of an entire religious group. A person you would walk past on the street and not imagine the evil they had committed. Even the guards don’t look particularly concerned or threatened by his presence[12] [13].
Arendt reminds us that during the Nazi occupation of Germany Evil hid in plain sight, and the commonplace of horrific events worked to numb people. Evil had become ordinary, boring, and unremarkable. Monsters didn’t look particularly scary, and people had failed to be continuously alarmed by its presence. In other words, evil had become ‘normalized through everyday exposure, and a boring outward appearance.
In the past year or two, we have witnessed a self-outing of white supremacists across the U.S.. Most of the attention has focused on white supremacists men. No longer afraid to show their faces people like Sebastian Gorka add a lower case v. as a middle name to signal allegiance to a white supremacist Hungarian party called Vitezi Rend. He even felt comfortable enough to wear the symbol at the inauguration celebrations of the 45th president and on national TV sitting next to a black man.[14]
Gorka further normalized the symbol of white supremacy by claiming it was worn only to honor his family. The group tied to the symbolic pin disagreed. “A group with alleged historical links to Nazi Germany had told NBC News it was “proud” when President Donald Trump’s deputy assistant wore its medal.[15]”
Recently neo-Nazi Richard Spencer led a group of like-minded white people in a rally in Virginia. [16] While a mob bearing torches is on the surface a frightful scene, it’s worth noting that the neo-Nazi’s took a short cut and employed citronella tiki torches, which is more frightful for mosquitoes perhaps than people, for their Charlottesville gathering in May of 2017. It is also worth looking at how they dressed.
In the U.S. we are accustomed to seeing images of Neo-Nazi’s dressed in SS uniforms, wearing knee high black boots and employing swastika insignia on patches/badges/medals. The white supremacists at this rally looked decidedly mainstream.[17]
In fact, the dress code for this rally seems to be box store retail employee more than neo-Nazi hate group members. If you saw them walking down the street without holding signs, they would blend into everyday life.
This is decidedly the point. White supremacy in the U.S. is mainstream, not some group of men dressed in hood engaging in cult rituals around burning crosses. They are boring, plain vanilla boring, and work increasingly to make white supremacy mundane and normal. We see this also on-line with the use of social media, memes and twitter handle badges.
By now many are familiar with the icon of pepe the frog, a rather plain symbol that white supremacists groups took up to spread their message less aggressively. Twitter handles soon followed suit and began attaching mundane everyday icons to their profile to signal their white supremacist’s ideology. The new white supremacist’s groups who call themselves the “alt-right” decided to be strategic and emphasize the normalness of their hatred towards People of Colour and non-Christian religions. “The glass of milk is because white identity can be something as mundane as being lactose tolerant.[18]” One white supremacist explained to Megha Mohan for a BBC Trending interview in April of 2017. Now an icon of a glass of white milk or a strip of fried bacon, a dig against both Jewish and Muslim people, is a signal that you are a white supremacist.
The United States of White Supremacy
While Arendt’s banality partially explained the ability of ordinary German’s to look the other way knowing their Jewish neighbors and friends were being killed, she misses that many of the ideas that Eichmann and the rest of the normal looking monsters purposed and carried out were grown in the U.S. and were white supremacist ideology. The legal apartheid known as Jim Crow served as a model for Hitler to base the legal framework for the treatment of Jewish people in Germany[19]. Further, the Eugenics movement, intellectualized through the University of Virginia Dr.s and scientists, provided a biological reason to view non-whites as inferior[20]. In 1924 the state of Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 which led to non-consensual sterilization of indigenous people, blacks, and those deemed mentally, physically and sometimes economically unfit.
In the U.S. between the 1950’s and 1970’s, in response to pushback from black leaders in the civil rights movement and young Marxists in the Panthers, white folk started to sweep racism under the carpet. Racism became quiet contained in conversational whispers and euphemisms that hid the evil idea that blacks were genetically inferior to whites and could be treated with impunity, most violently, without any legal intervention. It should be noted Arendt first published this piece in 1963 just two years before the assignation of Malcolm X.
By the time the U.S. reaches the 1980’s white people were paying little attention to centuries of segregation practices (despite federal law) that remained informally in place. The uptake in black incarcerated bodies (Initiated by Regan’s expansion of Nixon’s war on drugs [read war on black people]) brought with is ever rising disparities in health and life expectancies for black bodies. In addition to the lack of prosecution for killing, raping, torturing, black people were not covered properly. In the 1990’s white people began to assume and proclaim out loud that racism was cured. Bill Clinton was ushered in as the first black U.S. president – because he could play saxophone and shake a black person’s hand without flinching.
Which brings us to today where a brief cursorily look at the current political and cultural landscape highlights what black and brown people have known all along. The banal evil of the Holocaust shares roots with the racist white supremacist practices of the U.S. and is still active and perpetuated by women and men.. There is a case to be made for the relations of ableism, and heteronormativity that is part and parcel of the ideology which allows racism to exist, I will not be making that case at this time but will concentrate on white supremacy the relation with the hatred of Islam and racism.
Everyday Evil
If you live in the U.S. and have been paying any attention to the news at all you know that there are many instances of black and brown people being killed by male strangers. Some are children (James Means[21]), some are stabbed (Timothy Caughman[22]), and many have been killed by the police (Tamir Rice[23], Eric Garner[24], Tanisha Anderson[25], Philando Castile[26] ). Each time this happens people turn the conversation into a mental illness problem; an issue of lone wolfs (Dylann Roof[27]) and not a problem of non-whites living in a white supremacist society.
Recently a Muslim girl, Nabra Hassanen, from Sterling VA, was raped then beaten to death with a baseball bat. She was heading with her friends were walking and riding bikes back to their local mosque when they encountered the killer.
An argument erupted between him and one of the teenagers, a boy on a bicycle, and he drove his car onto the curb in a fit of anger, the police said. The statement did not say what the argument was about. The teenagers ran from Mr. Torres, but he soon found them in a parking lot and got out of his car wielding a baseball bat and began to chase them, the police said.[28]
The killer managed to catch Nabra Hassanen hit her with the baseball bat, and then he kidnapped her took her to a nearby pond, probably raped her, and dumped her body in the water after he beat her to death with a metal bat[29]. Despite the fact that Nabra Hassanen was Hijabi and near a mosque and with a group of Muslims when she was kidnapped, police are labeling this a crime of road rage and not a hate crime[30].
These crimes are horrific and often shocking; however, black, brown and Muslim people are regularly dealing with hostile encounters with white people in public life. White people are often quick to dismiss the idea that racism is a problem, or that the deaths and hostility is a result of racism. White supremacy has rendered these events the norm rather than the exception. Now thanks to social media, they are being documented and disseminated.
On May 21st writer Carvell Wallace[31], a black man took to Twitter to describe an encounter in Oakland CA at a cafe. “he thought I took his seat. He BEGAN the conversation with ‘What the fuck are you doing here. You don’t belong here'”[32] The man yelled at Wallace for five minutes before being asked to leave by a “Latina” barista. Again other people were silent, including the man’s Asian companion. What made this incident particularly stressful was the fact that the day before, on May 20th, Bowie State University student Richard Collins III was stabbed to death while waiting for an Uber ride on the University of Maryland campus at a public bus stop.
According to reports, he was stabbed after refusing to move aside when ordered to do so by Sean Urbanski.
Urbanski walked up to them, and, according to witnesses, said, “Step left, step left if you know what’s best for you.” Collins simply replied, “No.” He stood his ground. Urbanski then stabbed him in the chest and fled the scene. Collins died at the hospital.[33]
Wallace recognized that encounters with white men had deadly consequences for black men, even in public spaces. He ends the story of his Oakland encounter by asking, “if there is decency in you, you must ask yourself what you are actually DOING with your body and your time to make it stop.”[34] This is poignant in that so many white people watch these encounters silently, not wanting to get involved, and sometimes actively supporting the attackers.
In Western culture, people tend to think of women as upholders of civility. Men are seen as “naturally aggressive” and women as “naturally genteel.” However, white supremacy is the norm in the U.S. and racist encounters with women are normal though less examined because they end less often in physical harm. Bell Hooks was writing about this over twenty years ago. “Black women are very likely to feel strongly that white women have been quite violent, militaristic in their support and maintenance of racism.[35]”
On May 14th Laila Alawa[36], a 25-Year old Syrian immigrant[37] was traveling on a flight from Boston to Washington D.C.. She was sitting in her seat with her headphones on sitting next to another passenger who had put his seat back to sleep, so she put hers back too. That’s when she discovered the white supremacist woman sitting directly behind her. The 50-year-old woman kicked her seat hard and glared when she turned around to see what had happened.[38]
The woman kicked and punched the back of Alawa’s seat for an hour and a half. “It was like I was on a punching bag.[39]” For an hour and a half, a white woman targeted and assaulted the back of a Muslim woman’s seat, only stopping if a flight attendant walked by. No one nearby, not even the one sitting next to her, did or said anything.
Twice in June videos went viral presenting racist women in public retail stores berating fellow shopper. A woman in Reston, VA (where Nabra Hassanen lived) complains that she should not have let the Muslim woman in front of her and that she wished she wasn’t let into the U.S..[40] The Muslim woman replies that she was born in the U.S., and the angry white woman proceeds to warn that “’Obama’s not in office anymore,’ … ‘We don’t have a Muslim in there anymore. He’s gone, he’s gone. He may be in jail, too.'”[41]
Later in June, another video went viral that presented a racist woman in Wal-Mart. “A woman who identifies as Eva Hicks, a Latina, shared a video of the confrontation on Facebook Tuesday, which shows a white woman in a teal shirt yelling at her to ‘go back to Mexico.’”[42]
In another instance of white supremacy on display in public a black man at Starbucks in Chicago where a black man was battered by a white man and caught on video.
“23-year-old William Boucher can be heard on the video screaming at an unidentified black man: ‘Shut up, slave! Do not talk to me!’… ‘Get on all fours right now!’ Boucher screams. ‘Get on all fours! Do not walk off on two legs! You don’t deserve to walk on two legs, vermin.’[43]”
These are a few examples of the daily types of interactions people of color, Muslims, and especially black folks encounter on a daily basis in the U.S.. If you think racism isn’t real, go out in public with your “black friend” and pay attention to the regular aggressions (micro and macro) that they are forced to navigate shopping, eating, or walking.
Ignoring the Obvious
Equally superfluous was the lesson to the Jews in the Diaspora, who hardly needed the great catastrophe in which one-third of their people perished to be convinced of the world’s hostility. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of anti-Semitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist movement since the Dreyfus Affair; it was also the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German Jewish community to negotiate with the Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime.[44]
Arendt describes the normality of anti-Jewish ideology that pervades in Western culture or at least European culture. This is the banality of evil she wants to expose. However, it is quite remarkable that having lived in the U.S. from 1941 till her death in 1975[45] she completely ignored the banality of white supremacy. Given that Arendt is living in the U.S. there is little to excuse her from not knowing about the major events shaping the civil rights movement.
Escalating white violence in the South disheartened proponents of racial justice during the 1950s. Many black people, especially young people, became impatient with the slow process of legal cases. To them, the federal government was both remote and unhelpful, and organizations like the NAACP seemed too legalistic and conservative. Local people, they decided, must take direct action to change racial patterns in their communities. Beginning in February 1960, with the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins at the Woolworth lunch counter, the sit-in tactics spread like wildfire throughout the South. These tactics initiated the most powerful phase of America’s Civil Rights Movement, which peaked over the next five tumultuous years. The restless young people had been essentially correct: Direct-action protest, especially if it provoked violence by white extremists, was the most productive means of civil rights activity.[46]
This speaks to the separation of blacks and whites and the problem of working towards social/economic justice without addressing white supremacy.
Without adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with the nonwhite “other,” white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle.[47]
By ignoring the obvious ubiquity of white supremacy in the U.S., Arendt herself participates in the normalization of racism. She sees how the everydayness of anti-Jewish thoughts and actions contribute to the massive slaughter of people under the Nazi regime, yet fails to see how this is linked to white supremacy and the struggle to end the everyday violence enacted against blacks in the U.S..
Whiteness is never interrogated by Arendt though the ideation of white supremacy is a key to the perpetuation of Hitler’s Nazism and his ability to lull the German public into acceptance and silence regarding the Holocaust. Jewish people are considered members of a distinct race, by the Nazis. As evidenced by not only the propaganda but also how the Nazi’s sought to enact the “final solution.” “The discussion turned first on “complicated legal questions,” such as the treatment of half- and quarter-Jews – should they be killed or only sterilized?[48]”
Thirdworld scholars, especially elites, and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce libratory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice.[49]
Bell Hooks teaches us to lower our expectations concerning work within the Ivory Tower as producing something Libratory for all be a small select group that is invested, whether by neglect or intent, with maintaining a white supremacist culture.
W.E.B. Dubois in his masterpiece The Soul’s of Black Folk tells us that the line of the 20th century was the color line, it is arguably the line of the first quarter of the 21st century as well. He also describes black people as being better able to solve the problems of social relations because they had a preternatural ability of foresight granted by their black skin. As Ralph Ellison describes it blacks were invisible because white supremacists saw them more like animals who didn’t warrant much notice until they turned the eye of your wife or daughter. The ability to live in the margins grants black people a unique perspective on how social relations work especially between blacks and whites and men and women. And because they have higher rates of arrest and incarceration they are often more familiar with how the justice system works, despite how they are portrayed in popular culture as illiterate idiots. And because they are black they directly experience racism from all people, including black people if you want to discuss colorism.
Because of this second sight, we would do well to look at scholarship written by blacks concerning what is deservedly gaining national attention – and that is white supremacy. Like Arendt herself, scholars still largely ignore this topic, and those that engage with it are often marginalized and driven out of the academy or never invited in. Plenty has been written about how the 45th president’s popularity and visibility of white nationalism signals that we should go back to Arendt for answers. I instead hold up the example of black women who have a better understanding of white nationalism and white supremacy because they have been dealing with it every single day of their life in some form or other.
First, we should recognize that for black people, white supremacy is banal, because it is indeed every present, but it’s not numbing in the way that the rise of the Third Reich was. White supremacy hurts people, it hurts their feelings, it hurts their mental health, it hurts their physical health (Flint Michigan’s water has poisoned hundreds of black children with lead), it kills them, they are shot and stabbed at random in public and die regularly and consistently at the hands of cops and civilians. Black people have been fighting for their lives since they were kidnapped and forced to come to the U.S.
The civil rights movement worked hard to overcome the inequity and danger caused by having black skin in the U.S. following landmark Supreme Court rulings such as Loving V. Virginia, Plessey V. Ferguson, and Brown V. the Board of Education black people started a new wave of investment in black culture. The idea was to overcome the daily denigration black people needed to have pride in themselves and their culture and even the culture of their forebears (thought very little scholarship was available in the U.S. concerning The Diaspora’s African Roots)
However, the culture soon became distorted and eventual co-opted and commodified for white supremacists. In the 1990’s hip-hop and rap became a thing that a lot of white kids enjoyed. Artists were beginning to make a living off the music. White people started putting their hair in corn rows, wearing baggy pants, and using slang to emulate the new styles coming out of urban hip-hop and rap that was born in poor and underserved neighborhoods that were increasingly dangerous due to guns and the crack epidemic that had started in the 1980’s.
The commercialization of black culture was of course nothing new – the banjo and instrument forever linked with ideas about the Klu Klux Klan and other racist white people was based on a sub-Saharan African instrument that enslaved people re-created. Just as Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus profit by adopting black culture in the U.S. today, in the 70’s the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were stealing from black southern blues
Perhaps because of how black scholars in the U.S. could see the rapid uptake of black culture into the mainstream for corporate profit did not change the fact of white supremacy. Did not change their social status at large and did not change the threats to their bodily existence In the 1990’s we saw a more nuanced look at identity and identity politics essentialism especially regarding binary identity categories was critiqued as being part of the problem.
What makes Arendt’s writing about the banality of evil is problematic in the end because it is centered on the experience rooting in white supremacy. And it is a little surprising that a Jewish woman would not recognize that evil only seems banal to those who are not threatened by the violence evil produces. Arendt left Germany in 1933 after completing her Ph.D. dissertation at the prestigious University of Heidelberg and obviously came from a family of means and education. She worked alongside Walter Benjamin and is considered a proponent of existentialist philosophy. Any existentialist in Europe worth their salt would have known of Franz Fanon and his writings about racism and how disturbing it is to be a black man, even a lettered middle-class black man, who must face racist aggression and white supremacy daily. White supremacy, as Hooks explains, allowed for Arendt to overlook the lived experience of black people completely which negates her ideas about the banality of evil. Similarly, writers today who have been dragging up Arendt piece to talk about the horror show that is the 45th president and to explain how evil is so normalized no one notices anymore are not black and do not hang out with black people in casual public settings on a regular basis. This is why having one black friend from the office does not erase your white supremacy – you can still be blind to the pain and suffering and death that black people in the U.S. face on a daily basis. This is also why we cannot continue to ignore black scholarship and activism if we truly want to end white supremacy. We must place ourselves in the margins and listen to what black people, especially the women, are telling us about U.S. social problems.
[1] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
[2] Ibid., 76.
[3] Kulkarni, “Korematsu, Trump and the Banality of Evil”; “Donald Trump and the Evil of Banality”; Dreier, “Donald Trump And The ‘Banality Of Evil.’”
[4] Journal, Institute, and Taxpayer, “The New Banality of Evil.”
[5] Schow, “Sabrina Rubin Erdely and the ‘Banality of Evil.’”
[6] Dreier, “Donald Trump And The ‘Banality Of Evil.’”
[7] http://www.facebook.com/laura.vozzella, “White Nationalist Richard Spencer Leads Torch-Bearing Protesters Defending Lee Statue.”
[8] “Man Charged In Killing Of Muslim Teenager In Virginia.”
[9] “Donald Trump’s White Nationalist ‘genius Bar’: Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Michael ‘Decius’ Anton and beyond – Salon.com.”
[10] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 15.
[11] Tharoor, “Top 10 Trials That Shook The World.”
[12] lawrencebush, “December 11.”
[13] “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth, Review: ‘Lifts the Veil.’”
[14] “Why Is Trump Adviser Wearing Medal of Nazi Collaborators?”
[15] “Sebastian Gorka Made Nazi-Linked Vitezi Rend ‘Proud’ by Wearing Its Medal – NBC News.”
[16] “White Nationalist Protesters Carrying Tiki Torches Draw Mockery, Scorn Online | The Sacramento Bee.”
[17] yespasaran, “The Alt-Right Holds Massive Rally To Defend White Heritage In Charlottesville, Virginia.”
[18] “How The ‘Great Meme War’ Moved To France, BBC Trending – BBC World Service.”
[19] “Hitler’s American Model.”
[20] “Origins of Eugenics.”
[21] “White Man Accused Of Killing Black Teen Who Bumped Into Him | HuffPost.”
[22] “Man Charged with Murder as Terrorism for NYC Hate Crime – CNN.com.”
[23] “Tamir Rice Shooting: Police Suspend Dispatcher for Eight Days – CNN.com.”
[24] Davis, “Here’s A Timeline Of Unarmed Black People Killed By Police Over Past Year.”
[25] Ibid.
[26] “Philando Castile Shooting: Dashcam Video Shows Rapid Event – CNN.com.”
[27] “Dylann Roof Pleads Guilty to State Charges in Church Massacre – CNN.com.”
[28] Stack and Mele, “Road Rage Is Cited in Killing of Muslim Girl in Virginia.”
[29] “Cops Suspect Slain Muslim Teen Nabra Hassanen Was Raped.”
[30] Stack and Mele, “Road Rage Is Cited in Killing of Muslim Girl in Virginia.”
[31] “Home.”
[32] carvell, “He Thought I Took His Seat. He BEGAN the Conversation with ‘What the Fuck Are You Doing Here. You Don’t Belong Here.’”
[33] “A Lynching on the University of Maryland Campus.”
[34] carvell, “He Thought I Took His Seat. He BEGAN the Conversation with ‘What the Fuck Are You Doing Here. You Don’t Belong Here.’”
[35] Hooks, “Feminism and Militarism,” 60.
[36] “Laila Alawa Archives.”
[37] Alawa, “Last Thread of the Day.”
[38] Ibid.
[39] Ibid.
[40] “Woman Goes on Hateful Anti-Muslim, Anti-Obama Rant in Va. Trader Joe’s, Says Remarks ‘Taken Out of Context.’”
[41] Ibid.
[42] Herreria, “Shopper Berates Latina, Then Calls Black Woman ‘N****r’ In Arkansas Walmart.”
[43] Edwards, “‘Shut Up, Slave!’”
[44] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 9.
[45] d’Entreves, “Hannah Arendt.”
[46] “The Civil Rights Movement.”
[47] Hooks, “Postmodern Blackness.”
[48] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 111.
[49] Hooks, “Postmodern Blackness.”
melungeon mullins 