Abstract
Recent scholarship on state-based race categories shows that racial classification is anything but stable and self-evident. Indeed, states continuously change the number of racial categories, their labels, and methodology for classification. Yet, despite the instability that characterizes official racial classification, colonial distinctions between Western and non-Western continue to shape racial taxonomies. This article advances an analytic of recursion to explain this continuity. Recursion refers to cultural processes that sustain and reanimate colonial logics of race beyond formal colonial contexts. I highlight three processes in particular: recuperation, modification, and reinscription. I demonstrate the utility of a recursive analytic through a historical analysis of the twentieth-century emergence of the novel Dutch race category “non-western allochthone.” Examining government reports and social science research on immigrant populations, I trace how state officials and prominent social scientists drew on and recalibrated a colonial binary distinction between Europeanness/whiteness and non-Europeanness/non-whiteness to distinguish supposedly assimilable from unassimilable migrants. A recursive analysis illuminates how changes to official taxonomies do not necessarily unsettle, and may even rest on, durable colonial conceptions of race.
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Notes
By a “sociology of racial conceptualization,” I refer to the study of how actors come to understand “what a race is, what distinguishes one race from another [and] how many and which races there are” (Morning 2011, p. 9).
As part of a broader pattern of racism denial and colonial forgetting in the Netherlands (Bijl 2012; Essed and Hoving 2014; Wekker 2016), which involves the suggestion that race is irrelevant to the Netherlands altogether (cf. author), the category “non-western allochthone” like many other racial concepts and symbols is marked by controversy about racialness. Disavowing that non-western allochthone is a racial category usually involves two arguments: first, that the Dutch state itself does not define it as racial and, second, that it does not center a biological conception of human difference. The former argument would suggest that social scientists ought to reproduce the categories of the state, which would be to confuse categories of practice for categories of analysis (Brubaker 2002). Adopting the state’s categories of practice as categories of analysis would make a serious analysis of the state practice itself impossible. The latter argument flies in the face of the well-documented centrality of the colonial relationship to racialization, which has never solely revolved around supposed biological differences (Cox 1970; Du Bois 1984; Hesse 2007; Wolfe 2016), even as such notions also mark the “allochthone” category in the Netherlands (Yanow and Van der Haar 2013). Based on a definition of race as the classificatory element inherent to colonial practices of exploitation and elimination by which European colonizers marked spaces and the populations inhabiting them as essentially different from “the West” (Hesse 2007; Wolfe 2016), the category non-western allochthone is unambiguously racial.
Postcolonial theorist Stuart Hall usefully denaturalizes the notion of Western Europe as internally homogenous and argues such homogeneity is a product and productive of the colonial encounter when he points out that: “Despite their many internal differences, the countries of Western Europe began to conceive of themselves as part of a single family or civilization” (Hall 1992, p. 197).
See also the remarks of political theories Barnor Hesse (2016) about race. Drawing on philosopher Alain Locke, he points out that the codification of racial categories was contingent on the development of a tradition of colonial practices that reproduced patterns of domination and subordination (Hesse 2016, p. viii).
Rapport van de Commissie ter bestudering van het Indo-Europese vraagstuk in Indonesië, betreffende een onderzoek naar de sociale zorg voor minvermogende Nederlanders in Indonesië, n.d, 2.27.01.01.128. Inventaris van het archief van de Raad voor Sociale Aangelegenheden in Indonesië, 1954–1958, Nationaal Archief. p. 32.
Ibid. p. 32.
Ibid. p. 66.
Ibid., p. 31–32.
At the time and at least until the mid-1970s, Moluccans were referred to as Ambonese in media and policy circles.
Instituut voor Sociaal Onderzoek van het Nederlands Volk, Sociologisch Instituut van de Nederlands Hervormde Kerk, Katholiek Sociaal-Kerkelijk Instituut.
Emphasis in source.
Emphasis in source.
Ecquivalent to the US Government Accountability Office.
It is worth reiterating here that the colonially constituted binary does not refer to the specific colonial possessions of any individual nation but rather to the discursive divisions drawn between those from the civilized west, and those from uncivilized non-west. As stated earlier, I contend that this division is a specific western colonial one and not a universal one (see also Hesse 2007).
Coördinatie interdepartemntaal beleid minderheden, n.d., 2.27.19.4.5.1.6938 Inventaris van het archief van het Ministerie van Cultuur, Recreatie en Maatschappelijk Werk, (1910) 1965–1982 (1990), Nationaal Archief. [emphasis in original].
Japan was excepted because it was considered an industrialized country too dissimilar from other Asian countries, and thus seen as on par with European countries in terms of its “civilization.” Currently, the Dutch bureau of statistics notes as a justification that migrants from Japan are mainly “expatriates employed by Japanese companies with their families” (https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/onze-diensten/methoden/begrippen/persoon-met-een-niet-westerse-migratieachtergrond visited 2/10/2022). Indonesia was excepted because labeling migrants from Indonesia as non-Western would mean that the overwhelming majority of migrants from Indonesia, i.e., repatriates, would be considered a problem group. This would contradict their status as model minority and at times even as white.
It is noteworthy that in recent years the allochthone label has been dropped by some government agencies and municipalities (e.g., the Municipality of Amsterdam and the Central Agency for Statistics) in official statistics for its purported stigmatizing effect and has been replaced by “people with a migration background,” but that the non-western/western binary as well as the methods of classification have been retained, further evidencing the pervasiveness of the binary distinction.
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Acknowledgments
For their comments on previous versions of this article, I wish to thank Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz Ann Shola Orloff, Barnor Hesse, Markus Balkenhol, Kim Greenwell, Karen Ivy, Angel Adams Parham, Perdana “Pépé” Roswaldy, Devin Wiggs, and Emily Anne Wolff. I also like to thank Managing Editor Cass Sever for her assistance throughout the publication process and Ronald Jacobs and two anonymous reviewers for their careful criticisms that certainly improved this article.
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Coenders, Y. Colonial recursion: state categories of race and the emergence of the “Non-Western Allochthone”. Am J Cult Sociol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-024-00214-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-024-00214-y