Racial categories in colonial petitions were unstable and contested

Evidence

Marginalia on the petitions, annotations on subsequent reports, and confusion over the population to which it referred—and how to refer to them—were scribbled across page after page. In question was both the “real” nature of the complaints and the racial identity of those involved. Demands to improve the pension allotment were seen as pertaining principally to the “Inlandsche Christenen” (“native Christians”) but the Minister of Colonies report to the King that September suggests that the identity of the participating population was less than clear. In it, the terms “Portugezen,” “creolen,” and “kleurlingen” (“colored”) were added, then the latter two were crossed out, substituting “Inlandsche kinderen” in the margins. If there was considerable ambiguity surrounding what to call the lower rungs of the mixed population, the evaluation of their inherent shortcomings was much more certain. As the Minister of Colonies put it: “The needs of these people are very few. For them, the half of a pension is more than the full pension for a European. Because of their limited mental capacities, they seldom get further than subordinate positions such as clerks, overseers, etc. for which the Radikaal is not required.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 518

Categorization

• SEED: The visible scribbling-over of racial labels — crossed-out ‘creolen’ and ‘kleurlingen’ — is a powerful archival artifact for an essay on how racial taxonomy was literally inscribed, revised, then papered over in colonial bureaucracy.
• XREF: Pairs well with broader literature on colonial classification and epistemic anxiety; the palimpsest of erased and substituted racial terms is a micro-example of what Ann Laura Stoler wrote about race as the limit of what counts as knowledge. — connects to: Colonial use of ‘black’ did not necessarily denote African descent — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 124