Colonial racial terminology collapsed abruptly as racial distinctions became codified

Evidence

But the term disappears almost as abruptly as it came into use. Whatever politics of identification and guardianship might have animated its currency in the late nineteenth century when unpublished commissions on white impoverishment were written, by the time of the published commission in 1902 the term was in decline, and by the 1920s, with racialized distinctions increasingly codified, largely abandoned. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 233

Categorization

• XREF: Maps onto the ‘complaints about immodesty’ pattern of terms rising and vanishing with political circumstance — but here the trigger is codification.