Commission reports blamed mixed-race poverty on native mothers’ moral failings and parental neglect

Evidence

At one level, the social semantics of these commissions would seem to offer few surprises. Their scripts are honed, as are the stereotypes to which they subscribed. They mirror even as they produce the prevailing idioms of colonial common sense. The phrases are stock and formulaic— faithful to the truth-claims of racialized rule. And the “causes” of distress among a “lesser class of Europeans and their descendants,” as we saw in the last chapter, are contradictory but invariably the same: they target the moral turpitude of native mothers incapable of instilling their mixed blood children with European sensibilities; parental ignorance and indif- ference account for absenteeism in mixed blood schools; destitution is the fault of lower-class European men who populated the army barracks with their native partners and with illegitimate children bereft of religious train- ing and knowledge of Dutch. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 819

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Speaks directly to the reader’s epistemic anxieties theme: how colonial commonsense produces contradictory causal explanations of distress.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the contradiction between ‘invariably the same’ causes and their mutual incompatibility get papered over in commission texts?

Related

• Official commissions blamed native mothers and fathers for the poverty of mixed-descent Europeans (similarity 0.93)
• Colonial commissions framed mixed-race poverty as a durable racial trait ignoring history (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial commissions blamed mixed-race poverty on moral failings rather than material conditions. (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial officials ranked mixed-race poverty as less shameful than European poverty. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial commissions converted scattered testimonies into archival evidence through readers’ shared racial assumptions (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial policy disputes were really disputes over how race could be known (similarity 0.80)
• Racial classification confused itself when welfare need rested on individual choice (similarity 0.79)
• The commission treated mixed-race traits as fixed across centuries of history (similarity 0.79)
• Contradictory colonial policies reveal competing racial epistemologies among administrators. (similarity 0.79)
• The Minister suppressed welfare findings citing missing statistics. (similarity 0.78)
• The commission collected elite racial beliefs alongside details contradicting its narratives (similarity 0.78)
• The survey mixed elite racial stereotypes with testimonies of actual material need (similarity 0.78)
• Commissions derived authority by assuming readers would complete truncated racial vignettes (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The commission collected elite racial beliefs alongside details contradicting its narratives #expands (0.60) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 912
• Local commissions reframed statistical poverty as a lesser problem than figures showed #complicates (0.50) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 960