Late-eighteenth-century Cape recordkeeping made white the default superior racial category.

Evidence

In any case, the last quarter of the eighteenth century saw the firming up of racial modes of delineation at the Cape. Record-keeping became more formal, its categories of counting more starkly defined. As in US censuscounting, “white” became the default category of delineation, carrying with its expression increasingly the presumption of superiority, as much on moral as on biological criteria of counting. Mixture increasingly came to be squeezed out of the self-portrait, erased from ideological self-representation in ways it couldn’t possibly be from the historical record, as I have argued above. Any vocal hint of mixed background came increasingly to be repressed, as much from family histories as from group articulation. And most revealingly, as Robert Shell points out, the bulk of the Cape’s 63,000 slaves were imported from venues east of Africa in the wake of rising Khoikhoi resistance, between 1784 and cessation of slave trading under the British in 1807–8. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1388

Categorization

• SEED: The erasure of mixture from bureaucratic self-representation while the historical record keeps it — a census-as-ideology angle on how administrative categories construct racial reality.
• XREF: connects to: Racial categories were administratively imposed on people formerly counted as white in the 1760s; Early Cape racial hierarchy existed without a race-based governing rationality; Colonial censuses turned diverse Europeans into a white race by 1911. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 682 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Racial categories were administratively imposed on people formerly counted as white in the 1760s #corroborates (0.85)
• Early Cape racial boundaries were drawn on religious rather than biological lines. #contradicts (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1360
• Early Cape racial hierarchy existed without a race-based governing rationality #complicates (0.75)
• Colonial censuses turned diverse Europeans into a white race by 1911. #expands (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 682