Imperial principles could not remain internally consistent when confronted by mixed-race subjects

Evidence

Consternations among those who governed were reactions to quiet and sustained assaults on the warped logic of “European” supremacy. Challenges took unexpected forms that showed imperial principles were not, and could not be, consistent with themselves. Inlandsche kinderen embodied and exposed hypocrisies that stretched beyond the native population— that only some Europeans had rights, that rights and race were not always aligned, and that awareness of those inconsistencies were evident to, and expressed among, empire’s practitioners themselves. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 59

Categorization

• XREF: Strongly echoes the reader’s work on moral panics over dress and identity signaling as class/political signaling - here race and rights misalignment plays the same diagnostic role. — connects to: Challenging empire is possible because it contains internal contradictions.