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For example, 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, which traffics in simplistic meme-driven distortions of history, ethnicity, and identity.