Colonial policy disputes were really disputes over how race could be known

Evidence

If the pauperism commissions provide sites where shared understand- ings were justified and rehearsed, the discrepant assessments of what counted as European impoverishment in a specifically colonial context pulled at the seams of common sense in unintended ways. It did more than reveal the flimsy fabric of racial categories. It exposed a centralized colo- nial state whose departments and divisions were not in touch. It called to discussion the intricate stitching and sloppy patchwork of educational pol- icy, residence laws, pension stipulations, and labor ordinances that contra- dicted one another as they differently defined what rules would hold for a colonial underclass neither fully of the rulers nor wholly of the ruled. If destitution of Europeans and their mixed descendants was the problem, what mattered to the “solutions” was how those who decided policy (and those who carried it out) imagined they could and should know race. Racial epistemologies were at issue. Epistemic politics and its practical conse- quences pushed the accumulation of paper. It was the political effects of how race should be assessed that had to be sorted out first. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 825

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s core ‘epistemic anxieties’ theme and to the reader’s focus on colonial archival commonsense.

Related

• Contradictory colonial policies reveal competing racial epistemologies among administrators. (similarity 0.91)
• Epistemic politics drove colonial archival production when race categories conflicted. (similarity 0.91)
• Colonial commissions treated everyday sensory details as proof of racial character (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial policy disputes centered on how race should be assessed, not what race is (similarity 0.83)
• Untrained colonial observers’ impressions passed as authoritative knowledge about subject people’s moral states. (similarity 0.82)
• Unsourced impressions replaced hard statistics and justified denying welfare resources (similarity 0.81)
• Pauperism commissions were diverted by racial classification anxieties (similarity 0.81)
• Racialized common sense substituted for evidence in Dutch colonial reporting. (similarity 0.81)
• Commission reports blamed mixed-race poverty on native mothers’ moral failings and parental neglect (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial pauperism differed from European because it measured ruler-ruled distance (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial commissions converted scattered testimonies into archival evidence through readers’ shared racial assumptions (similarity 0.80)
• Racialized colonial knowledge rested on flexible strategic attributes, not fixed essences (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial commissions framed mixed-race poverty as a durable racial trait ignoring history (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial classification was piecemeal and routinely unsettled by epistemic uncertainties. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial officials feared pauper whites as racial impostors blurring colonizer-colonized lines. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Colonial policy disputes centered on how race should be assessed, not what race is #expands (0.70)
• Colonial accusations of indolence and insolence were codes for racial unfitness. #exemplifies (0.55)