Discoursive deracialisation is not a new phenomenon. Huttenback (1976, p. 21) offers us a number of examples from nineteenth-century British white colonial policy arising from the conflict of two sets of principles:

One way to reconcile the desire to exclude non-whites from the colonies and the philosophy of the Empire was to pursue policies racialist in effect but to justify them non-racially.

In response to the 1854 anti-Chinese demonstrations in Australia in which the Chinese were ‘injured, their property destroyed and their claims appropriated as they were driven from the mining communities’, an ingenious way of limiting Asiatic immigration was devised (either intentionally or by accident). The Duke of Newcastle ‘purported to be concerned about the conditions under which Chinese travelled to Australia’ and suggested that legislation be introduced imposing penalties ‘on all ships bringing immigrants to New South Wales in which it might appear that a sufficient proportion of space had not been allotted to the Emigrants or an adequate issue of provision made regularly to them throughout the voyage or that the Ship had left China in an unseaworthy state’.