Racial categories were administratively imposed rather than biologically fixed

Evidence

In the parish of Aquin, where the Raimond family lived, there was a remarkable surge in the free-colored population not because of a baby boom or migration, but because administrators began applying racial terms where they had not done so before. Individuals and families were in effect transformed from white to mulatto or quadroon. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts/‘complicates’ the premise in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ that visible markers underwrite strict social distinctions — here the category shifts the person, not the person the category. — connects to: The category of the Other precedes and enables material oppression, not vice versa — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 147; Nineteenth-century race was a loose cultural term, not a fixed category. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 69; Race-thinkers needed anthropology to classify Europeans into distinct hereditary types — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 914 (+11 more)
• SHARE: For a colleague who studies classification systems: whole families switched legal race via census forms, not demography.
• QUESTION: How did those reclassified as ‘mulatto’ litigate or resist the administrative rewrite of their identity?