Casta categories emerged from everyday life, not systematic design.

Evidence

First, the overall schematism shaping Casta-characterization is an amalgam, hardly consistent or systematic. The categories emerged over time in the referential sociality of everyday life, revealing the underlying dispositions, prejudices, relational rationalities, abjections, anxieties, attractions, desires, cruelties, even humor if not derision. But laced through all of this, holding it together as a schematism of sorts, is the thick racial history of the region, in all its concrete determinations. There is, at the heart here, a sort of horrified fascination, a repellent attraction to interracial intercourse, structured as it is in dominance. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1106

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Milgrom’s point about institutions emerging bottom-up from everyday sociality rather than top-down design.