Orientalists did not invent racism, which already circulated in the street

Evidence

Renan’s racism merely put a pompous pseudo-scientific gloss on ideas that already circulated in the street. People did not need to have Orientalists invent racism for them. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 297

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Directly challenges the Said thesis latent in this book’s framing: that Orientalist scholarship manufactured racist ideas. Irwin insists popular racism predated and was merely dressed up by scholars.
• XREF: Echoes the argument in the reader’s prior reading on how moral panics and popular sentiment often precede elite articulation; also counterpoints social constructionist accounts across the corpus.

Related

• Orientalist truth about racial difference was radical and ineradicable (similarity 0.80)
• Philology’s elite esotericism served as a vehicle for racial hierarchies (similarity 0.79)
• Even anti-racist Orientalists held fixed cultural essences for the racialized (similarity 0.79)
• Racialized origin-thinking trapped both the researched and the researcher. (similarity 0.78)