Racialized colonial knowledge rested on flexible strategic attributes, not fixed essences

Evidence

Pauperism commissions were key tools of that social imaginary that productively fed off racial common sense while reproducing its resilient and refreshed modern forms. It was neither somatics nor essentialism that gave racialized knowledge its epistemic force. Racial essences, like those honed in the Indies, rested not “on immovable parts but on the strategic inclusion of different attributes, a changing constellation of features, and a changing weighing of them.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 987

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which racial knowledge accrued epistemic force: a shifting constellation of attributes weighted strategically, not immutable somatic traits.
• DEEPTHINKING: Articulates the core thesis — racial common sense is epistemically powerful precisely because it is flexible, not because it is fixed — worth sitting with as the book’s central insight.