Racial differentiation relied on affective character judgments, not countable evidence.

Evidence

Proof of the difference between destitute whites and Indo-European paupers was construed by identifying distinct sorts of persons, with specific dispositions and states of mind. Details of the everyday were elevated to reliable proof of character. Neglect of children, indifference to work, succumbing to native standards were affective states not captured in numbers; condemnations of the sensory world in which poor whites lived afforded more palpable and convincing evidence of what colonial agents already thought they knew about the sorting of people and how race shaped distinct habits and inclinations. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 183

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates to the morality-as-signaling thread of the dress article — here the ‘moral sign’ is behavioral/affective rather than sartorial, but the same logic of inference from surface to character operates.
• XREF: Links to Foucault-era work on confession and the production of interiority as evidence; the ‘affective states not captured in numbers’ point echoes how depth-hermeneutic methods outranked counting.