Vanishing Race: Kuyper’s Theology, Ethical Politics, and the Disappearance of Race Language in Indonesian Colonialism

This paper examines the relative disappearance of race language in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century under Abraham Kuyper’s Ethical Politics. Although racial discourse was widespread in European colonialism, colonial governance in Indonesia increasingly relied on the moral idioms of ethics, education, and tutelage rather than overt racial classification. I argue that this shift did not mark the end of racial hierarchy but its displacement into theological, moral, and pedagogical forms. The contrast is especially striking because Kuyper employed explicit racialized language elsewhere, including in his 1898 Princeton lectures and in his support for the Boers in South Africa. The Indonesian case shows how colonial domination could be recast as ethical responsibility while preserving structures of exclusion and inequality. Read from the present and through the lens of haunting future/s, this history suggests that racial power may survive most effectively when it no longer appears explicitly as race, but lingers in the moral vocabularies of care, tutelage, and responsibility.