Category labels like race and mentality are evaluative interpretations, not neutral designations

Evidence

Such ideas and their authors emerge out of complex historical and cultural circumstances, at least two of which have much in common with the history of Orientalism in the nineteenth century. One of them is the culturally sanctioned habit of deploying large generalizations by which reality is divided into various collectives: languages, races, types, colors, mentalities, each category being not so much a neutral designation as an evaluative interpretation. Underlying these categories is the rigidly binomial opposition of “ours” and “theirs,” with the former always encroaching upon the latter (even to the point of making “theirs” exclusively a function of “ours”). This opposition was reinforced not only by anthropology, linguistics, and history but also, of course, by the Darwinian theses on survival and natural selection, and—no less decisive—by the rhetoric of high cultural humanism. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 570

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the scaffolding vocabulary the reader is building — the division into collectives and the ours/theirs binary are direct ancestors of later Islamophobia-analysis categories like the construction of the Other. — connects to: Adjectives and predication can reorient racial labels into negotiated identity categories — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 54; Classification and symbolization alone are harmless unless they escalate to dehumanization; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them” (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which racialized category labels operate as evaluative rather than neutral.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 570