Higher 1940s internment-camp death rates of Indos were blamed on their ‘weaker moral fibre’.

Evidence

Histories bury themselves deep in words. So do causal narratives. In 1947 when the death rate of Indos in Japanese internment camps was found to be much greater than that of full-blooded Europeans, it was again attributed to the Indos’ “weaker moral fibre.” But if everyone could claim to know something about the interior, mental lives of the Indo poor, they still knew next to nothing about how they lived. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 986

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Direct extension of the chapter’s core thesis: the ‘epistemology of race’ persisted through 1947, beyond the colonial period.
• SEED: Angle: a single racial trope (‘weak moral fibre’) with a fifty-year career from 1901 commissions to postwar internment mortality statistics.

Related

• Even higher wartime death rates of Indos were blamed on their weaker moral fibre (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial discourse framed poor Indos as a biological racial threat (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Even higher wartime death rates of Indos were blamed on their weaker moral fibre #corroborates (0.95)
• Colonial discourse framed poor Indos as a biological racial threat #expands (0.60) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1005
• Colonial accusations of indolence and insolence were codes for racial unfitness. #complicates (0.50)