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This chapter offers observation on the European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia. Patriarchal principles were not always applied to shore up government priorities. Colonial authorities with competing agendas agreed on two premises: Children had to be taught both their place and race and the family was the crucial site in which future subjects and loyal citizens were to be made. These concerns framed that fact that the domestic life of individuals was increasingly subject to public scrutiny by a wide range of private and government organizations that charged themselves with the task of policing the moral border lands of the European community and the psychological sensibilities of its marginal, as well as supposedly full-fledged, members. At the heart of the tension between inclusionary rhetorics and exclusionary practices was a search for essences that joined formulations of national and racial identity. Racism is commonly understood as a visual ideology in which somatic features are thought to provide the crucial criteria of membership. But racism is not really a visual ideology at all; physiological attributes only signal the non-visual and more salient distinctions of exclusion on which racism rests. Racism is not to biology as nationalism is to culture. Cultural attributions in both provide the observable conduits, the indices of psychological propensities and moral susceptibilities seen to shape which individuals are suitable for inclusion in the national community and whether those of ambiguous racial membership are to be classified as subjects or citizens within it.