What If Version 2 Is More Violent?
You removed the category and described only “concrete details.”
But what did you describe? Physical appearance? Skin color? Clothing? Accent?
Question: Is describing someone as “a person with dark skin wearing a hijab speaking Arabic” less othering than saying “a Middle Eastern student”? Or is it actually MORE violent because now you’re forcing hyper-visibility of physical difference?
When you removed the category, did you just replace one kind of marking with another – trading political/regional categories for racial/physical ones?
Sit with this: Maybe the category “Middle Eastern” was doing some protective work – allowing identity without forcing physical description. Maybe removing it makes difference MORE visible, not less.
What if your “concrete description” is just as much about marking otherness – but now you’re doing it through bodies instead of geography?
What If You Can’t Write Version 2?
Some groups might have discovered: without the category, you can’t actually say what you saw.
If you observed e.g. “Middle Eastern students gathering in the cafeteria”:
- Version 2: “Students gathering in the cafeteria”
- But then… what were you even observing? What made it notable?
If you observed “Arabic books in the library”:
- Version 2: “Books in a script I recognized but can’t read, organized under classification system XYZ”
- But does that actually capture what you were seeing? Or are you just performing ignorance?
Question: If you can’t articulate your observation without the category, what does that reveal?
Does it mean:
- The category was doing ALL the work (organizing your entire perception)?
- Your observation was never really about what you saw but about what you already believed?
- There WAS nothing there to observe except your own categorizing gaze?
Maybe you weren’t observing “Middle Eastern presence” at all. Maybe you were observing your own need to identify difference.
What If the People You’re Observing Want the Category?
You removed “Middle Eastern” from your description to avoid othering.
But what if the person you observed identifies strongly as Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian – and considers “Middle Eastern” an important part of their identity?
Question: By refusing to use the category, are you:
- Respecting their complexity and refusing reductive labels?
- OR erasing their identity and the political/historical significance they attach to it?
When you wrote Version 2 with “only concrete details,” did you just describe a generic student/person/space – effectively whitewashing them into neutral “German campus” space?
The tension: The category can be simultaneously:
- A colonial imposition that others
- A source of solidarity and political identity
- A framework people in diaspora use to find each other
- A way institutions manage and contain
You can’t escape this contradiction. Any move you make – using the category, refusing it, problematizing it – has costs.
What if there IS no ethical position here? What if every choice is compromised?
Provocation 4: What If Version 1 Reveals More?
You’re supposed to see that Version 2 is “better” – more specific, less reductive, more concrete.
But what if Version 1 (with the category) actually reveals MORE about how power works?
Example:
- Version 1: “The Middle Eastern Studies Institute is located in the basement of Building X”
- Version 2: “An institute focused on languages and histories of West Asia and North Africa is located in the basement of Building X”
Question: Which version actually shows you the power dynamics?
Version 1 immediately reveals: there IS a category called “Middle East,” the university HAS organized knowledge around it, and it’s literally BELOW ground level.
Version 2 sounds more sophisticated but might hide the fact that the reductive category EXISTS and HAS MATERIAL EFFECTS.
The problem: Sometimes using problematic categories is the only way to make their violence visible.
If you refuse to say “Middle Eastern Studies,” how do you critique how “Middle Eastern Studies” operates as an institutional structure?
What If You’re Just Performing Academic Virtue?
You removed the category. You wrote concrete descriptions. You avoided essentializing.
Congratulations. You’ve done the academic performance of anti-essentialism.
But ask yourself:
- Did anything actually change?
- Does writing Version 2 mean you’ve stopped categorizing people?
- Or have you just gotten better at hiding the fact that you’re still doing it?
Are you genuinely trying to see people differently, or are you trying to prove you’re the kind of person who knows better than to use reductive categories?
When you wrote Version 2, were you thinking about the person you observed – or were you thinking about how sophisticated your description sounded?
Even more: This entire exercise might be training you to perform complexity while leaving your actual perceptions unchanged.
What if the “good” version (without categories) just teaches you to hide your categorizing while still doing it?
What If There’s No Version Without Categories?
Here’s the possibility nobody wants to face: maybe Version 2 doesn’t exist.
You think you removed the category. But did you?
Every description creates boundaries. Every observation requires some framework for deciding what’s worth noticing.
Can you observe ANYTHING without organizing it through categories?
Maybe the problem isn’t the specific category “Middle East.” Maybe the problem is that human perception itself works through categorization. (Surprise, it does!)
If that’s true, then what? Do you just give up? Accept that all observation is compromised? Resign yourself to using problematic categories because there’s no alternative?
Or: Do you stay in the discomfort of knowing every description is imperfect, every category is violent, every observation is complicit – and do it anyway, as carefully as you can, acknowledging the damage?
What If the Category Is Doing Multiple Things Simultaneously?
You examined what the category was doing in Version 1. You probably identified one main function: organizing foreignness, or managing difference, or creating institutional structure.
But what if it’s doing ALL of these at once:
- Recognizing identity (some people DO identify as Middle Eastern and want recognition)
- Creating otherness (marking people as perpetually foreign)
- Organizing knowledge (structuring how the university produces scholarship)
- Enabling solidarity (giving people in diaspora a framework to find each other)
- Containing threat (making the region legible for security purposes)
- Distributing resources (determining who gets funding, jobs, institutional support)
- Facilitating erasure (lumping distinct peoples/histories together)
The category is SIMULTANEOUSLY doing harm and doing necessary work.
It’s othering people AND giving them institutional visibility. It’s erasing specificity AND creating space for community. It’s organizing domination AND enabling resistance.
You cannot solve this. You cannot find the “right” way to use or not use the category because it’s fundamentally doing contradictory work.
So what do you do when every option is compromised and the category is both violent and necessary?
That’s the discomfort you take with you.

