ABSTRACT
For instance, although she condemned racial repression, she viewed 1957 civil rights protests in Little Rock, Arkansas, to end school desegregation as acts that destabilized rather than expanded democracy. Arendt's inconsistencies on racial justice and democracy mirror the confusion of a national culture that historically promoted democratic thought while it pursued racist politics. For over a century, in the postbellum, civil rights, and war-on-crime eras, the people have seen black-personified violence and the masking of institutional racial violence and white criminality. Responding to three waves of racist violence in the twentieth century-from turnofthe-century lynchings through midcentury repression of civil rights activists to the late-century racialized prison industry, state executions, and new manifestations of police racism black intellectuals countered racial terror and fascistic movements within democracy. US visual culture renders social violence, particularly sexual violence, synonymous with blackness.
