The ideal of nonpolitical knowledge obscures the political conditions of its own production.

Evidence

What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that “true” knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not “true” knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 69

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core move of Said’s argument: ‘true knowledge is nonpolitical’ is itself an interested claim that masks the political circumstances of knowledge production.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and the notion that ‘common sense’ presents ruling ideas as neutral — a key scaffold concept for the Islamophobia field. — connects to: Treating goods as static obscures the social relations that produce unjust distributions. — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 62; No selection of what to know is politically or socially neutral. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 545
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 69