Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

The Legalization of White Supremacy in Canada 197
of treatment of those of other races seeking to live or already resident in British
territories.
The transmission of formal legal models was only part of the process of
institutionalizing racist policies. More important, because it fostered the social
and political climate in which white supremacist legislation became possible,
was the sharing of racist ideas and sentiment within and between white settler
populations. Especially among the white communities on the Pacific rim, as
trade and commerce expanded and seaborne travel became safer and more
efficient during the course of the nineteenth century, regular contacts and lines
of communication developed. Both in the white dominions and on the United
States west coast there were apostles of white exclusivity. The sentiment was
passed between them and tailored to fit the particular circumstances of each
community. 67
The agents of racist ideology included the people who moved between and
across the various jurisdictions - gold miners, missionaries, traders, sailors,
white migrants and even recreational travellers. In the case of communities
which were geographically proximate, in particular British Columbia and the
west coast American states, institutional links, particularly within the labour
movement, engendered strong feelings of common cause and solidarity in
the face of the Asiatic intruder. 68 Personal contact, while important, was
necessarily limited. It was the press which was probably the single most
important factor in the translation and dissemination of racist ideology. In
communities in which there was little time to read and absorb information
and opinion, let alone to discriminate between conflicting views of the human
condition, newspapers and magazines provided the only constant source of
news and commentary to which most people were exposed. 69 A significant
majority of publications was ill disposed to the Chinese and their editors
and contributors made no bones about it. Moreover, the press at large was
prone to publishing material drawn from other sources, in particular that which
had cultural and scientific pretensions, which was racist in content, without
any attempt to comment upon it, let alone call it into question. For white
populations already suspicious of oriental 'intruders' their prejudices were
confirmed and hardened by what they read in newspapers and magazines.
The existence of strong racist sentiment in the white dominions and the
resulting pattern of first restrictive and later exclusionary legislation was
not aberrational, an accident, as it were, of geography or the product of
a change in the climate or something in the drinking water. The emergence
of racism in those jurisdictions was connected to a more profound process
of acculturation, the growth of an aggressive form of racial consciousness
67
C.Price, TheGreatWhiteWallsareBuilt:RestrictiveImmigrationtoNorthAmericaandAustralasia,
1836-1888 (Canberra, 1974).
68
For the origins of this connection through the Knights of Labour, see Roy, above n. 3, 54-63.
69
See R. Evans, K. Saunders and K. Cronyn, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race
Relations in Colonial Queensland (Sydney, 1976), 15-16.