Colonial officials feared pauper whites as racial impostors blurring colonizer-colonized lines.

Evidence

As the Governor-General was warned in 1881, European pauperism was not new. But news of it increased within government circles and the press, which broadcasted at high volume that impoverishment was “felt more and increasing by the year.” Others painted a more sinister canvas still: an uncountable underclass spanning generations, cultural chameleons alternately seen as racial impostors, misplaced natives, disaffected Dutchmen, and defective and fictive Europeans. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 668

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘Who counts as European?’ — the material fragility of whiteness in colonial societies, very relevant to identity theory.
• XREF: Echoes The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s theme where the boundary between insider and outsider is policed not by blood but by perceived allegiance. — connects to: White fear of black invasion rested on false images of the newcomers as lower-class — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 174