Colonial officials ranked mixed-race poverty as less shameful than European poverty.

Evidence

Still, the compassion of the commissioners was conservatively husbanded and not directed everywhere. It extended most directly to “the full-blooded European element” forced to live in “decent poverty” (“fatsoenlijke armoede”), a poverty they esteemed “harder to bear than the kind suffered openly”; that is, by those of mixed descendants, who they seem to have imagined suffered impoverishment with lesser shame. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 843

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the racial hierarchy of shame in colonial classification reviewed elsewhere in colonial studies of the Indies.