An Unmistakable Trace of Colour: Racializing Children in Segregation-Era Cape Town, 1908-1933*
An Unmistakable Trace of Colour: Racializing Children in Segregation-Era Cape Town, 1908-1933*
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明显的色彩痕迹：种族隔离时代的开普敦儿童，1908-1933 年*
DOI：
10.1093/pastj/gtx035
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发表时间：
2018
期刊：
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Jackson W
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Jackson W
本文使用了广泛的案例记录，南非的第一个儿童福利社会-社会保护儿童生命（SPCL）-作为手段，重新思考如何种族已构成家庭和社区在殖民地的背景下。它使用了“明确无误的颜色痕迹”的想法，作为一种方式来考虑怀疑的重要性，在该协会的案件记录。在一个种族混合历史悠久的背景下，从外表判断种族特别困难：在开普敦，“欧洲人”和“有色人”之间没有明显的区别。然而，颜色的概念代表了其他各种明显非种族差异的标志。虽然关于家庭的观念在很大程度上源于国际儿童福利运动，认为种族无关紧要，但肤色仍然是组织线索，为个人案件记录提供了叙事和道德结构。因此，许多此类案件档案的故事是通过道德、性格和体面的语言来构建种族的。案卷的最大局限性在于，它强调个人作为一个独立的个体而被认识，脱离了其社会背景。因为儿童是在家庭的环境中被理解的，而家庭是一个总是漏洞百出的社会机构，所以不可能将儿童与其社会背景隔离开来。实际上，将儿童从家中带走并将他们安置在机构或其他形式的照料机构就实现了这一点。案件档案记录了这一过程背后的复杂历史。
This article uses the extensive case records of South Africa’s first child welfare society – the Society for the Protection of Child Life (SPCL) – as the means to rethink how race has been constituted within families and communities in colonial contexts. It uses the idea of an ‘unmistakable trace of colour’ as a way to considering the importance of doubt in the Society’s case records. In a context with a long history of racial mixing, judging race from physical appearance was especially difficult: in Cape Town, there was no readily obvious difference between ‘European’ and ‘Coloured’. The idea of colour, however, stood as a signifier for various other, apparently non-racial, markers of difference. While ideas about the family, derived to a considerable extent from the international child welfare movement, saw race as irrelevant, colour nevertheless worked as the organising thread that gave narrative and moral structure to individual case records. The story of many of these case files, therefore, is of the construction of race through languages of morality, character and respectability. The great limitation of the case file is that it was premised on the individual being made knowable as an individual, detached from its social context. Because the child was understood in the setting of the family, a social institution that was always porous, it was impossible to isolate the child from its social context. Removing children from their homes and placing them in institutional or other forms of care achieved this in practice. The case files record the complex history behind that process.