Colonial being-in-the-world constituted a concrete style governing speech, feeling, and thought.

Evidence

Being a White Man was therefore an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the nonwhite worlds. It meant—in the colonies—speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgments, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend. In the institutional forms it took (colonial governments, consular corps, commercial establishments) it was an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world, and within this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal communal idea of being a White Man ruled. Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 569

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the chapter’s core definition of ‘being a White Man’ as a style of being — the mechanism by which colonial authority produces selfhood.
• XREF: Style of being-in-the-world is the chapter’s stated thesis (Style, Expertise, Vision) and feeds directly into the Orientalism-as-discourse toolkit, linking to Foucault’s discursive formation and Hall’s representation theory. — connects to: Colonialism functioned through thingification that made the oppressed accept subjugation as natural. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 262
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that colonial identity is simultaneously idea and reality, a communal authority that even whites must bend before while permitting personal latitude, is a dense account of how subjectivity is institutionally produced.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 569