Racial stereotyping operates by eliminating history and reducing a people to a timeless essence.

Evidence

This self-blinding is accomplished rhetorically in two ways that are worth looking at closely. First, history is eliminated unilaterally: “the effects of the Iranian revolution” are set aside in the interests of the “relatively constant…cultural and psychological qualities” underlying “the Persian psyche.” Hence modern Iran becomes ageless Persia. The unscientific version of this operation has Italians becoming dagoes, Jews yids, blacks niggers, and so on. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 101

Categorization

• XREF: Same mechanism as orientalism’s dehistoricizing gaze Said describes elsewhere; connects to stereotype content research. — connects to: Mass culture abolishes the individual’s lived history, reducing life to disposable instants — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 185