Sentiment accusations against colonized groups enforced racialized hierarchy

Evidence

Attribution of sentiments mapped what was “out of character” and “out of place.” Mixed bloods could only be called “too proud” because they expected more than they were granted: better jobs than those given to “natives,” access to the betterpaid and well-pensioned civil service ranks (from which they were barred). They were deemed “self-aggrandizing” because they refused to do manual labor, as we shall see in the next chapter. Creoles could only be called “imperious” in a political system in which they expressed political commitments to issues that mattered less to those Dutch-born Europeans for whom the Indies was but a temporary home. Native women who thought to outfit their mixed blood daughters in European dress to secure their entrance into better schools could be called “duplicitous” and “conniving.” Such attributions both reflected controversies about social hierarchies and consolidated those distinctions. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 593

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘immodesty’ article (moral panic over dress) and to Hacking’s nominalist point that classifications create realities.