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The Racism of Anti-Racists: Bourdieu, Said, and Inverted Orientalism

“On one hand, we have the symbolic violence of intellectual gatekeeping, where certain voices—usually elite, often Western—decide which suffering is legitimate and which resistance is ‘too Western’, ‘too liberal’, or ‘not authentic enough’. On the other, we have the remnants of Orientalism living on in reverse: an unwillingness to confront tyranny when it wears traditional clothes or speaks the language of anti-imperialism.

“Bourdieu showed us how elites define what counts as legitimate knowledge. Said exposed how empire produces false knowledge in order to rule. But what neither could have fully foreseen is this third form: where knowledge cloaked in anti-imperialist jargon becomes a tool to delegitimize resistance.”

Here is an example:

Tariq Ali cannot being himself to go beyond 'geopolitics' to sociology. There is not a single mention of the Iranian society, power relations, repression, etc., and how all that is related to 'geopolitics'. 

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