An indictment of a soft violence that wears credentials, not uniforms. This essay maps how intellectual gatekeeping—what Bourdieu called the “racism of the intelligentsia”—polices who gets to speak and which suffering counts. It tracks a alliance with inverted Orientalism: the reflex to excuse non-Western authoritarianism as “authentic culture” or anti-imperialism, while disciplining dissidents as inauthentic or “Western.” Drawing on Said and Bourdieu, it names how petitions, panels, and performative solidarity reproduce hierarchies they claim to oppose. The result: silence marketed as care, respect weaponized as censorship, and a demand that the oppressed fit a script before their pain is admitted.