Racializing a people can induce them to enact the very caricature assigned to them

Evidence

By contrast, Arafat’s interminable history, of course, was one of too often tragic and occasionally comic mistimings, miscues, and misdirections. The consequences were more than often bitter, even devastating, as much for his own people he claimed to represent as for Israelis he clearly did resent. Orientalize the Palestinian, philistinize him, and he will act out accordingly. The Arab is a dog, Arik had always said, the prototypical Judas; she a whore, the quintessential Delilah. He will howl, keeping you awake at night; she will infect you, blind you, sucking away your strength. Kill as many “worms” as you can, the Sharonites have always implored, for fear they will otherwise overrun you. Take their land, for it is ours. Destroy their houses, villages, olive groves, for they do not belong. We should have done so long ago; let’s finish it now. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 618

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The self-fulfilling-prophesy loop — orientalize a people and they act out accordingly — plus the animalizing worm/dog/whore rhetoric collapsing into an explicit land-taking imperative, is a dense, layered argument worth sitting with.
• SEED: The line ‘orientalize the Palestinian and he will act out accordingly’ frames a feedback-loop mechanism — dehumanizing labels producing the behavior that then justifies the labels — usable as a lens on any occupied population.
• XREF: connects to: A group can move from oppressed to oppressor by changing its racial assignment — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 31