Race, Pools & Schools from “Reflections on Little Rock” to McKinney, Texas

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations Division II

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s controversial essay “Reflections on Little Rock” contains a robust defense of discrimination in the social realm. After reconstructing this defense, I apply Arendt’s argument about the practice of discrimination to an oft-overlooked integration battle, swimming, to argue that defining activities as “social” in fact creates racialized threats to life while simultaneously denying that there may be political remedies to these problems. When swimming is treated as a private or social activity, Black children drowning at disproportionately higher rates are not a political matter. I conclude that the turn to Arendt’s essay as a resource for thinking about school integration in a post-Brown legal landscape or as an intellectual grounding for marriage equality ultimately legitimates broader forms of discrimination and their lethal consequences.

Author

• Gabriel Pacal Mares, Princeton University