Empiricist determinism made racial essence inescapable and unknowable to its subjects.

Evidence

Thus, in trying to formulate a prototypical and primitive linguistic type (as well as a cultural, psychological, and historical one), there was also an “attempt to define a primary human potential,” out of which completely specific instances of behavior uniformly derived. Now this attempt would have been impossible had it not also been believed—in classical empiricist terms—that mind and body were interdependent realities, both determined originally by a given set of geographical, biological, and quasihistorical conditions. From this set, which was not available to the native for discovery or introspection, there was no subsequent escape. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 585

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The double bind — the native’s character is determined by conditions he cannot access, and so cannot escape — is the epistemic core of how racialized subjects are constituted as objects of knowledge rather than knowers. This is the mechanism that makes ‘Oriental despotism’ or later ‘Muslim backwardness’ unfalsifiable.
• XREF: Connects to how colonial psychology constitutes the racialized subject’s selfhood as externally knowable but self-opaque — scaffold for later readings on racialized selfhood.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 585