Dutch colonial legal status required performed estrangement from native identity.

Evidence

Access to European legal status for the Indies-born of mixed parentage, as I have long argued, was accorded based upon the display of a familiarity and proficiency with European cultural styles that required proofs of estrangements from other social kinds—evidence of feeling “distanced” from that “native part of one’s being,” “of “feeling no longer at home” in a native milieu. That racial membership was as much about the cultivation of culturally trained moral virtues and character as it was about the hue of skin produced a quest for measures of those sensibilities as well as protracted debate about how they “safely” might be rendered inaccessible to some and by others easily obtained. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 396

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete archival claim about racial membership as cultivated sensibility — directly relevant to the reader’s colonial commonsense project.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘feeling no longer at home’ functioned as a bureaucratic credential — a measurable performance standard.