The Unwelcome Child: Elizabeth Eckford and Hannah Arendt
- ️https://sussex.academia.edu/VickyLebeau
Related papers
Elizabeth Eckford's Appearance at Little Rock: The possibility of children's political agency
Politics, 2008
In 1957, Hannah Arendt argued against the legally enforced desegregation of public schools in the American South. She argued that African Americans had mistaken schools and education for a site of political debate, when they properly belonged to a social realm instead. This article disagrees and reconsiders Arendt's separation between the social and political realms. Arendt also took exception to the role Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year-old, played in this debate. It is argued here that Elizabeth Eckford's actions were deeply political and give rise to a need to consider the possibility of children's political agency.
Reflections on Hannah Arendt's "Reflections on Little Rock"
HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, 2020
Hannah Arendt wrote "Reflections on Little Rock" in the Fall of 1957, occasioned by a picture in The New York Times. There were actually two pictures in the Times on September 4, 1957. It is widely assumed that Arendt refers to the photo of Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year old black girl being taunted by a white mob of adults after she was refused entrance to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. But it is as likely that she describes the other photo, which shows Dorothy Counts, another 15-year old black girl also being harassed by a mob of white students as she and a family friend walk toward Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Arendt speaks of only one photograph: "I think no one will find it easy to forget the photograph reproduced in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, showing a Negro girl, accompanied by a white friend of her father, walking away from a school, persecuted and followed into bodily proximity by a jeering and grimacing mob of youngsters." Arendt seemingly combined the two photographs in her mind's eye, describing the scene in North Carolina while attributing it to Little Rock. Originally published as: "Zur Kritik an Hannah Arendts »Reflections on Little Rock«", in "Hannah Arendt und das 20. Jahrhundert," Catalogue for a Museum Show at German Historical Museum Berlin, ed. by Monika Böll. (2020)
Friendship and the Public Stage: Revisiting Hannah Arendt’s Resistance to “Political Education”
Hannah Arendt’s essays about the 1957 crisis over efforts of a group of youth, the “Little Rock Nine” to desegregate a Little Rock high school reveal a tension in her vision of the “public.” Looking closely at the experiences of the youth desegregating the school, especially Elizabeth Eckford, this article traces a continuum of forms of public engagement in Arendt’s work. This ranges from arenas of “deliberative friendship,” where unique individuals collaborate on common efforts, to a more conflictual “public stage,” where groups act in solidarity to change aspects of the public world. While Arendt famously asserted in the essay “The Crisis in Education” that political capacities should not be taught in schools, it makes more sense to see this argument as focused on what she sometimes called the conflictual “public stage,” reflecting the experience of the “Nine.” In contrast, we argue that Arendt’s own work implies that “deliberative friendship,” as described in Arendt’s “Philosophy and Politics” essay and elsewhere, should be part of everyday practices in classrooms and schools.
This essay interprets Hannah Arendt's concept of the "social question" through a reading of her controversial essay "Reflections on Little Rock." I argue that Arendt's social question refers to social climbing and not simply poverty, as she initially suggests. The social-climbing framework illuminates "Little Rock" in two ways. First, it explains why Arendt opposed mandatory school desegregation, which she saw as black social climbing, that is, African American citizens and the NAACP using the US courts and federal government to raise the status of African Americans to the level of whites. Second, and more significant, it provides a framework for criticizing "Little Rock" with Arendt's own standards and criteria in mind. Reminded by Arendt of the suspect politics of social climbing, we can see something she did not: segregation was not "natural" association but an institution established after the Civil War to protect white social climbing and social advancement.
Hannah Arendt and education: broadening the debate
Prospero: A Journal of New Thinking in Philosophy for Education and Cultural Continuity, Volume 21, Issue 2 pp. 25-29, 2015
Discussion of Arendt’s views on education tend to draw heavily – if not exclusively – on her 1958 essay, ‘The Crisis in Education’, and her 1959 article, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’. Both these pieces focus on issues relating to schooling and education during the years of childhood – a phase of human life which Arendt saw as distinct from adulthood. Both, also, were critical interventions in public debates on schooling and education that were taking place at the time: ‘The Crisis in Education’ being a response to the widely reported decline in educational standards across the USA and ‘The Crisis in Little Rock’ a highly controversial interjection in the debate on educational discrimination and segregation in the southern states of the USA. In this brief paper I seek to widen the parameters of the debate and reflect on what might the implications of the broader corpus of Arendt’s ideas – particularly as they relate to the notion of ‘thinking’ – for both education in general and the role of the university in particular.
A Fissure in the Distinction: Hannah Arendt, the Family and the Public/Private Dichotomy
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 1998
By way of an analysis of Arendt’s defense of the public/private distinction in The Human Condition, this essay attempts to offer a re-interpretation of the status of the family as a realm where the categories of action and speech play a vital role. The traditional criteria for the establishment of the public/private distinction is grounded in an idealization of the family as a sphere where a unity of interests destroys the conditions for the categories of action and speech. This essay takes issue with this assumption and argues that the traditional conception has had a pernicious effect not only on women, but on men as well. This argument is supported by locating a fissure in Arendt’s analysis of this distinction which suggests a profound structural affinity between the public realm and the family.
Hypatia Reviews Online, 2015
Kathryn Gines's book details Hannah Arendt's racial and conceptual biases against Black people in the US and post-colonial Africa. Gines makes original and significant contributions to feminist philosophy by applying various feminist and anticolonial strategies, including standpoint theory and multidirectionality, to Arendt's political essays and concepts. Feminist critiques of Arendt in general and racial critiques of "Reflections on Little Rock" in particular are not new; however, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question offers a novel and comprehensive racial critique of Arendt's major writings. Gines offers a "sustained analysis of Arendt's treatment of the Black experience in the United States" (xii), as well as racial violence within the contexts of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and French and British imperialism and colonialism. In this review I will offer an overview of the book as a whole, before evaluating the extent of Gines's critique as it pertains to Arendt's misguided judgments and her theory of judgment.