Parenting and nursery practices were core sites where racial dispositions became second-nature

Evidence

The supremacy of reason did figure prominently in the making of rule and its statist projects but its distinction from the affective never constituted a stable epistemic ground. Parenting practices, nursery rules, and sleeping arrangements were not archival marginalia. These were the sites in which self-regulating habits were formed and in which dispositions to race and empire were made “second-nature.” “Unseemly” sentiments indexed mismanagement of the polity and mismanagement of the self. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 611

Categorization

• SEED: The claim that ‘unseemly sentiments indexed mismanagement of polity and self’ could seed an essay on how contemporary moral panics conflate personal and state governance.
• XREF: Ties to the domestic/infant-care material in Stoler’s earlier work — parenting as racial formation practice against the reader’s known archival focus.