People with light hair lived outside racial categories beyond state documentary reach

Evidence

The failures and false starts of social reform took mounds of paper to explain away. Those explanations fostered evidentiary vignettes and the richly (ethno)graphic on their storied margins. Even in its impressionistic mode, the commission provided testimony to the changing geography of race. In this molten social landscape, people were transgressing both moral and spatial boundaries, living where they were said not to be “at home,” where fair-skinned adults and children “did not belong.” Below the purview of government surveillance and its documentary practices—birth certificates, housing permits, and legal declarations of male paternity— had emerged a muddled social space occupied by men and women with “light hair,” and by “blue-eyed” children who were vagrants or beggars, living homeless or in hovels on the outskirts of European neighborhoods or in native compounds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 856

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how documentary regimes (birth certificates, housing permits, paternity declarations) produce rather than merely record racial order — and who slips through their gaps.
• XREF: Echoes the ‘one square inch’ concern with what escapes official record-keeping, but here applied to colonial population control rather than sound.