Colonial misery of mixed-race kin was deliberate structured abandonment, not neglect.

Evidence

Governors-General, Ministers of Colonies, and their underlings had crafted those policies themselves. These were not areas of state inattention or oversight. These were enduring zones of state abandonment, structured by successive administrations’ refusals to recognize kinship that transgressed race and to include within their charge the native kin of “a certain class” of Europeans. These were the public secrets of the Indies and the commission set them out in exacting terms. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 842

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ann Stoler’s work on ‘public secrets’ and colonial racial governance in the Dutch East Indies, and to scholarship on systematic state neglect of mixed-race populations elsewhere.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘enduring zones of state abandonment’ and ‘public secrets of the Indies’ as analytical terms for colonial policy outcomes.