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Appendix 3 - Examples from colonial history of discoursive deracialisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2011

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Summary

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:

On the one hand marched the concept of what Burke had called ‘the natural equality of mankind at large’ which, under the influence of nineteenth-century liberal humanitarianism and the evangelical movement, had turned into the concept of trusteeship and the imperial philosophy of a nonracial empire, all of whose subjects were equal before the law. Emerging on the other hand was the determination of the British settlers in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada that theirs must be a ‘White Man's Country’.

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’.

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British Racial Discourse
A Study of British Political Discourse About Race and Race-related Matters
, pp. 263 - 264
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1983

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