Dutch compassion for Boers did not extend to racial kin in the Indies

Evidence

But Knaap also targeted the hypocrisy of Dutch compassion and its racially circumscribed character. Why was there such an outpouring of interest and sympathy for the South African Dutch (de Boeren) admittedly devastated by the Boer War, he asked, while the dismal fate of European paupers in the Indies left his Leiden neighbors “utterly cold?” He accused them of needing “high drama to stir their feelings,” whereas the “tragedy of quiet distress and submissive social misery escaped them all.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 939

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ work on how moral/emotional attention is selectively distributed along identity lines.
• SEED: Angle: the geography of compassion — why distant dramatic suffering (Boers, exotic tragedy) mobilizes feeling while proximate quiet misery does not; Knaap gives a 1904 colonial diagnosis.