An Indo writer blamed poverty on parenting, not race, to urge state discipline.

Evidence

In Sinjo Fran’s account the “quality” of Indos left “much to be desired,” but they were not to be blamed for it. It was the abysmal lack of good child rearing that was at the root of all, fathers as well as mothers who knew neither the value of labor nor the importance of “kontrole.” In a narrative that drew on virtually every racialized cliché about Indos that now saturated the air of the colony, he did something else. He addressed the rich and well-off, their fear of revolt and demand for security from a state that had to take charge of the aimless and sullen Indo youth, if necessary “by force.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 994

Categorization

• SEED: The spectacle of a colonized subject deploying the colonizer’s own racialized moral framework against his own community—‘respectability politics as internalized discipline’—is a strong essay angle.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how much of Sinjo Frans’s rhetoric borrows directly from the pauperism commission reports he claims to rebut.