Racialized ‘national mind’ discourse survives only for Islam and Arabs

Evidence

Yet what has not been sufficiently stressed in histories of modern anti-Semitism has been the legitimation of such atavistic designations by Orientalism, and more important for my purposes here, the way this academic and intellectual legitimation has persisted right through the modern age in discussions of Islam, the Arabs, or the Near Orient. For whereas it is no longer possible to write learned (or even popular) disquisitions on either “the Negro mind” or “the Jewish personality,” it is perfectly possible to engage in such research as “the Islamic mind,” or “the Arab character”—but of this subject more later. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 674

Categorization

• XREF: This is the exact pivot the reader needs for the Islamophobia readings that build on this book — the persistence of ‘Islamic mind’/‘Arab character’ research where Black/Jewish equivalents became taboo.
• SEED: Strong angle: charting why the same racial abstraction that became unspeakable for Jews and Black people remains legitimate for Muslims and Arabs across a century of scholarship.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 674