Colonial rule enforced privilege hierarchy through legal control of mixed-race parentage

Evidence

The second solution, considered in the “better interest of Motherland and the Indies itself, and not least the Native population,” was to adhere to the existing policy and to maintain the hierarchical relations of privilege that distinguished Natives from Europeans. This, as the commission noted, remained the “ideal” but depended on three prerequisites: (l) removal from the Indies of those who could not “live without financial worries” in a European manner; (2) assurance that children of mixed marriages would be assigned the legal status of their (native) mothers and not that of their European fathers; and 3) more strictly enforced regulations for recognition of illegitimate children (within 5–10 days of birth with possession of a birth certificate and the presence of two witnesses who could attest to parentage). — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 976

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The three prerequisites reveal privilege as a legal machinery: expulsion of impoverished Europeans, assigning mixed children their mother’s native status, and tight birth-registration rules — showing that racial hierarchy is administered through family law and paperwork, not mere prejudice.
• XREF: connects to: Federal courts treated polygamous family norms as racial threats to democratic society; Smithsonian anthropometry manufactured mixed-blood status to legalize land sales — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 609