Official commissions blamed native mothers and fathers for the poverty of mixed-descent Europeans

Evidence

Their scripts are honed, as are the stereotypes to which they subscribed. They mirror even as they produce the prevailing idioms of colonial common sense. The phrases are stock and formulaic— faithful to the truth-claims of racialized rule. And the “causes” of distress among a “lesser class of Europeans and their descendants,” as we saw in the last chapter, are contradictory but invariably the same: they target the moral turpitude of native mothers incapable of instilling their mixed blood children with European sensibilities; parental ignorance and indifference account for absenteeism in mixed blood schools; destitution is the fault of lower-class European men who populated the army barracks with their native partners and with illegitimate children bereft of religious training and knowledge of Dutch. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 819

Categorization

• XREF: The moral-turpitude-of-native-mothers trope echoes colonizing gender-and-race logics seen in other imperial contexts the reader studies. — connects to: Blame shifted from children to their poor and immigrant families. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 488