Untrained colonial observers’ impressions passed as authoritative knowledge about subject people’s moral states.

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

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s colonial archival interest: this is common-sense/epistemic authority material that parallels work on how colonial knowledge-claims justify resource denial.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘epistemology of race’ as a term for how claims about colonized peoples’ desires/dispositions become sanctioned imperial knowledge.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense argument that racialized epistemic claims about subjects’ moral states did the administrative work of denying welfare resources — warrants sitting with.