Colonial commissioners deployed colorblind rhetoric to undermine lower-class European claims.

Evidence

It was history-making in another sense: these commissioners imagined themselves as progressive and modern men, enlightened and less constrained by the colonial rubrics of race. A. S. Carpentier Alting, a prominent Protestant cleric and member of the elite society for arts and letters, spoke for many board members when he wrote to the commission Chair, “One can no longer speak of ruler and ruled in this time, as people are all the same. That a European has greater needs than a native, cannot be claimed. It certainly cannot be said of those Europeans, who by descent and character stand so very close to the native.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 889

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Speaks to how ‘immodesty’/status-signaling rhetoric gets used — parallels the moral-panics article’s treatment of class/identity signaling through dress.