Racial assessments persisted as scholarly truth-claims despite formal legal abolition of race criteria

Evidence

Such comparisons passed as scholarship because the force of race rendered these racialized assessments as equivalencies, as truth-claims with commensurability, untouched by time. The “house of glass” was more fragile than ever. If pass laws for natives were rescinded in 1914, and race (rascriterium) was abolished as a legal criterium in 1918, many of those who lived in the Indies in the 1930s would not have noticed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1011

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of epistemic anxiety in colonial science and to Ann Stoler’s ‘Along the Archival Grain’ and ‘Race and the Education of Desire’ on race as a persistent common sense despite legal changes. — connects to: Reading judicial opinions as cultural productions exposes races’ contested origins — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 364; the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”
• SEED: An essay angle: how formal abolition of explicitly racial legal categories does not dismantle racialized epistemic frames — the persistence of racial common sense after legal change.