White supremacist rhetoric repackaged

‘Antiquated racial ideas’ cannot hide in euphemism, says David C. Atkinson.

Martin Collacott’s June 5 editorial on immigration resuscitates the same chauvinistic ideas that animated white supremacists in B.C. a century ago. While he conceals the source of his anxiety by using vague terms like “visible minorities” and “newcomers,” his arguments represent a thinly veiled invocation of “Yellow Peril” rhetoric that was commonplace in provincial society during the early 20th century. Like many contemporary critics of immigration on both sides of the Atlantic, Collacott tries to disguise these antiquated racial ideas in euphemism and socio-economic anxiety, but the fact remains that this is old wine in an old bottle.

Previous advocates of a “White Canada” regularly deployed the same arguments Collacott uses in their efforts to restrict Asian and other non-white immigration. For example, his core contention that Canada will “voluntarily allow its population to be largely replaced by people from elsewhere” was a constant refrain of the anti-Asian exclusion movement in B.C. (and elsewhere) during the early 20th century.

Charles Wilson used the same idea when testifying before the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration on behalf of the province in 1902. Decrying the supposed flood of Asian immigrants to B.C., Wilson implored the commissioners to “preserve one of the fairest portions of the earth’s surface for the Canadian people, and not allow it to be wrested from them, not by conquest, but simply by engulfing us in the rising tide of oriental immigration.”

This widespread fear of impending white elimination was driven partly by apprehensions about the province’s geographical proximity to Asia, and partly by its isolation from other Canadian population centres. However, it was the irrational fear of an overwhelming Asian influx that truly chilled the blood of provincial exclusionists. As Vancouver City MP Herbert Henry Stevens warned during a public demonstration against the release of South Asian passengers from the Komagata Maru in June 1914, “at our doors there are 800 millions of Asiatics ... the very least tremor from that source would unquestionably swamp us by weight of numbers.”

At the same time, contemporary white supremacists are especially enamoured by this notion of white erasure — or “white genocide.” Derived in part from the writings of convicted murderer David Lane, it has become one of the central messages of the so-called alt-right.

It is not surprising that Collacott also worries about immigrants bringing “values and traditions that may differ in key respects from those of most Canadians.” Using the same kind of disingenuousness favoured by alt-right activists, he highlights liberal notions of “gender equality and concern for protection of the environment” as principles that his anonymous immigrants would find unworthy of protection.

Collacott also echoes his predecessors and the modern alt-right in blaming an assortment of faceless bureaucrats, developers, multiculturalists, and immigration activists for this impending disaster.

In reality, Collacott nostalgically yearns for an imagined homogeneous past that only ever existed in the minds of the province’s most obstinate white supremacists.

In reality, Collacott’s commentary squarely reiterates these previous champions of white supremacy. They, too, essentialized Asian immigrants as hyper-competitive and economically rapacious interlopers, or as culturally alien intruders. Those ideas rested then, as now, on fundamentally racist notions of immutable racial characteristics that preclude assimilation and spell only disaster for Canada. Whether couched in a century-old language of civilizational decline, racial degeneration, and economic competition, or camouflaged in the altright’s semantic contortions of white nationalism, ethnostates, and identitarianism, these are profoundly dangerous ideas that undermine the very foundation of modern Canadian society.