Racialized origin-thinking trapped both the researched and the researcher.

Evidence

The point to be emphasized is that this truth about the distinctive differences between races, civilizations, and languages was (or pretended to be) radical and ineradicable. It went to the bottom of things, it asserted that there was no escape from origins and the types these origins enabled; it set the real boundaries between human beings, on which races, nations, and civilizations were constructed; it forced vision away from common, as well as plural, human realities like joy, suffering, political organization, forcing attention instead in the downward and backward direction of immutable origins. A scientist could no more escape such origins in his research than an Oriental could escape “the Semites” or “the Arabs” or “the Indians” from which his present reality—debased, colonized, backward—excluded him, except for the white researcher’s didactic presentation. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 587

Categorization

• XREF: The ineradicability-of-origins claim is the theoretical scaffold for how racialized subjects are locked into identity — connects to biopolitics and Fanon’s colonial psychology in later Islamophobia readings.
• DEFINE: Defines the defining move of racial essentialism: origins as immutable boundaries that construct races, nations, and civilizations.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 587