Colonial administrators struggled to fix race terminology to specific social kinds

Evidence

Figure 3. This page is from Minister of Colonies Baud’s report to the King. Here is a striking example of how difficult it was at the time to fix terminology to specific social kinds. In his report on who participated in the 22 May 1848 demonstration, the terms “creolen” and “kleurlingen” were added, then crossed out and substituted with “Inlandsche kinderen” in the left margin. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 344

Categorization

• SEED: This is a perfect concrete example of how categories of race/identity were unstable in imperial vocabularies — could seed an essay on the instability of colonial race labels.
• XREF: connects to: Colonial use of ‘black’ did not necessarily denote African descent — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 124; Colonial governance positioned subjects through intertwined racial and gendered classification. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1661