The pauper category policed racial standing rather than measuring material want

Evidence

Such invasive questions were not unusual for poor commissions. What made these so charged was the category of “pauper” itself and who was reckoned—and who reckoned themselves—to be included in it. The commission, by its own admission, was never about poverty per se. It was designed to identify Europeans living in a style and at a level that was not commensurate with how Europeans should live in a colonial situation. “Needy” was a relative term and those who were cast in that category saw themselves subjected to inquiries unbefitting their station: pauperism and scrutiny of their private lives was to define their place in the politics of race. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 921

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The recoinage of an economic term (pauperism) into a racial-status term — categories of welfare as tools of racial definition — is a dense conceptual move with wide comparative reach.
• XREF: Directly extends the book’s thesis of epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense; also resonates with how ‘poor white’ categories functioned in the American South per scholars like Neil Foley. — connects to: The category of the Other precedes and enables material oppression, not vice versa — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 147