Unsourced impressions replaced hard statistics and justified denying welfare resources

Evidence

Nor were the assessments of a civil servant cadet, newly arrived in the Indies (and perhaps newly posted in the region, since promotions entailed transfers every few years), ever subject to question. For this was credible knowledge that circulated widely and was already implicitly shared. Claims to know the moral dispositions and desires of the disadvantaged and the distributions of their affective states were expressions of an epistemology of race. Such sanctioned knowledge constituted the psychic and material privilege and violence of empire and the inequities that it so guarded and nurtured. These were the grounds on which the allocation of new resources was rendered unnecessary and unwarranted, as was the state’s responsibility for social welfare. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 971

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates ‘epistemology of race’ concretely: the knowledge structure by which unsourced colonial impressions carry epistemic authority.
• SEED: Could seed an essay on how bureaucratic ignorance is weaponized as policy — the colonial commission refusing to gather statistics while trusting impressions.
• XREF: Connects to Ann Stoler’s work on colonial knowledge and archives; also to the logic of administrative discretion in welfare denial. — connects to: Modern welfare ideology replaces moral blame of the poor with suspicion — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115; Right-wing commentators denied welfare suicides could be evidence against reform — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1597; Privacy rights were deliberately withheld from impoverished women on welfare — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 223 (+1 more)