Colonial racial categories resisted stable definition by officials themselves

Evidence

For here was a category that neither color nor race could readily or reliably delimit or contain. Everyone knew about the “so-called Inlandsche kinderen,” but few agreed on who and how many they were. Nor did naming alone, as Hacking argues, call upon and secure a common set of attributes. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 64

Categorization

• QUESTION: What does it do to category theory when classifiers themselves cannot agree on extension?
• XREF: connects to: Colonial policing hardened fluid status groups into fixed racial identities. — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 50