Seemingly neutral welfare questions encoded racial and moral surveillance categories

Evidence

On the face of it, these were standard questions. That was not so for the more precise inquiries under each general heading. Under “past and present life style,” the inquiry asked about opium and liquor use, prostitution, profligacy, and gambling. Local religious teachers were to verify “the sort of people with whom [the needy] mingled,” “whether [they] lived as Europeans or mixed with the Native population,” whether the person in question “lived apart from the native population or in the kampongs or desa [village] among them.” On Dutch-language competence, parents were asked about their children’s fluency, a question that people quickly recognized as one that would be interpreted to assess how, and among whom, they lived and raised their young. European women in relations with native, Arab, or Chinese men were asked about “their nationality,” the age at which they entered concubinage, and whether they had borne children not belonging to their present family. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 907

Categorization

• XREF: Shows how the bureaucratic survey form became a technology for sorting populations by race and morality — connects to analyses of colonial census and enumeration practices.
• SEED: Article angle: how mundane administrative question design smuggles in racial commonsense — the ‘standard questions’ that are never neutral.