2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) If a Negro in a white community is considered a Negro and nothing else, he loses along with his right to equality that freedom of action which is specifically human; all his deeds are now explained as ‘necessary’ consequences of some ‘Negro’ qualities; he has become some specimen of an animal species, called man. Much the same thing happens to those who have lost all distinctive political qualities and have become human beings and nothing else. 80 Arendt’s example raises the question what might remedy the racist dehumanisation of blacks by a white community, but she does not answer this question in ‘Imperialism’. 81 In ‘Imperialism’, Arendt maintains a conception of politics in which people are either equal citizens or abstract figures of mere difference who threaten the political artifice by bringing the ‘dark background of mere givenness’ into the public sphere. However, such a conception of politics obscures the political mechanisms of exclusion that put some people into the latter category, and forecloses a politics of actively confronting and countering these mechanisms. Such a conception of politics can only lament the political production of stateless people, but not imagine a politics of countering their predicament. By contrast, a politics of countering the predicament of stateless people — being forced into the conditions of ‘savages’ — requires historicising and politicising the mechanisms of exclusion, and starting from the relations that already exist between citizens and stateless people, instead of disavowing them. Such a politics would situate itself within the history of imperialism and postcolonialism, consider the connections between the political production of statelessness and the political production of race, and prominently include a politics of anti-racism. VI THINKING WITH WE ARE HERE Why, then, is it still so useful to return to Arendt’s ‘Imperialism’ to analyse refugee politics and refugee rights in the present? In this concluding section, I will address this question by discussing the politics of refugee collective We Are Here in Amsterdam. I will first recall the origins of this collective, and then explain why a critical reading of ‘Imperialism’ is useful for making sense of their politics. On 4 September 2012, six men set up a make-shift tent in the yard of the Diaconate of Amsterdam, an organisation of the Dutch Protestant Church that 80 81 ibid 302. In Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Harcourt 1970), Arendt’s answer is republicanist: integration into a political community that would consider race irrelevant. In that text, Arendt accuses black protestors challenging the exclusion of blacks from United States universities of seeking to lower academic standards, and laments their demand for curriculum changes by qualifying Swahili (‘a nineteenth century kind of no-language’) and African literature as ‘nonexistent subjects’. Arendt cites with approval a black critic of the protestors’ demands who argues that ‘what Negro students need is “remedial training” so that they “can do mathematics and write a correct sentence”, not “soul courses”’: at 95–96 app VIII. 208