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Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States
Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today.
She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity - founded and built by immigrants - was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good - but inaccurate - story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception.
While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.
Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today.
She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity - founded and built by immigrants - was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good - but inaccurate - story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception.
While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.
392 pages, Hardcover
First published August 24, 2021
297 people are currently reading
8366 people want to read
About the author
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
33 books855 followersRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco. Connect with her at reddirtsite.com or on Twitter @rdunbaro.
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October 7, 2021
As Mahmood Mamdani brilliantly reminds us, “If Europeans in the United states were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies of the New World. Instead, they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.” Settlers, unlike immigrants, demand they carry their sovereignty with them (Zionism, anyone?). Mamdani also said that a deracialized U.S. would still remain “a settler society and a settler state.” Roxanne’s book’s central thesis: “The nation of immigrants myth erases the fact that the United States was founded as a settler state from its inception and spent the next hundred years at war against Native Nations in conquering the continent.” US Liberals and the Right still see our Revolutionary War as anti-colonialists overthrowing British colonists. Progressives today see Revolutionary War as devotees of both settler-colonialism and racial capitalism (ex-land surveyor and slave holder GW and crew) mortally threatened by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (stop your settler-colonial land-dispossessing crimes) and the British Somerset Decision of 1772 (stop your backwoods racial capitalism crimes - a.k.a. $LAVERY). The 1763 Proclamation was opposed to continued stealing through plunder the thousand-year-old native villages in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region.
In the Smithsonian locked away is a photograph taken by a US Cavalry soldier of an Indian baby lying in a field of snow shredded by a Gatling gun. We are not supposed to see this photo.” The first US immigration law was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The NRA was once a rather benign organization until taken over by the white nationalist Second Amendment Foundation, actually founded by the border chief of “Operation Wetback”. The Second Amendment at that point became a white nationalist cause. The average number of guns by US gun owners today? Eight. Picture westward expansion through native land with “settlers armed to the teeth”. A full third of the continental US was “brutally annexed through a war of conquest” in 1848. Note that: “Trump was not against European immigrants.”
In the hit play “Hamilton”, Hamilton and Lafayette both laughingly proclaim after the battle of Yorktown: “Immigrants: We Get Things Done”. What rubbish. Hamilton was then (1781) a citizen of Great Britain and Lafayette was a French militarist soon to return to France. Miranda’s Hamilton is based on a hagiography written by a guy not even trained in history (Ron Chernow). In real life, Hamilton was a hard liner on the presence of foreigners. Experts on Aaron Burr thought the play depicted Burr wrongly. Burr was a man of the Enlightenment, championing press freedom, criminal justice reform, and the rights of women and immigrants. “George Washington raffled off slave children to pay his debts.” Hamilton sided with the French during the Haitian Revolution and not with the Blacks seeking freedom and liberty. This play wouldn’t dare tell you that Hamilton himself bought and sold slaves; instead, the play Hamilton is a liberal feel-good US origin fantasy which erases both slavery and the indigenous while turning racist founders (signing documents to EXCLUDE all non-whites) conveniently into men of color. No wonder, progressives didn’t buy such selling of the deeds of wealthy white men as musical entertainment, even with the buttered popcorn. Hamilton even talked about sending the US army into Spanish Florida, and then continuing on to Central and South America. What a douchebag.
Our founders were neither oppressed nor colonized. Instead, call them imperialists who envisioned the taking of the entire continent as spoils. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance had provisions taken from prior British settler-colonialism in Ulster. One thing that separated our founders from the British, was that our founders were collectively able to say the rather contradictory expression “empire of liberty” without breaking out laughing.
The primary motive for settler-colonialism is not race, but territory. The US was founded as a “settler-colonial, fiscal military state” promising free land to white males in order to push “recruiting and motivating settlers to squat on Indigenous people’s lands.” Much native land division was done with surveyor’s Gunter chains placed twenty-two yards apart. Daniel Boone is an icon of US settler-colonialism. Our Western Territories stayed territories so long because of clear continued native resistance to US settler-colonialism. Let’s listen to Union General Sherman explaining his US army directives: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children… during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” US state violence clearly against those who committed no crime permeates our history, if you allow yourself to see it. Did you know US military annals STILL lists the Wounded Knee Massacre as a victorious “battle”? Most of us have learned years back about the Trail of Tears under Andrew Jackson but not that the Navajo and Dakota Nations were also forced to march away from their homelands during the Civil War. Remember that it was the theoretical “good” Union side of the Civil War that actually committed the Sand Creek Massacre. Conservative Christians will love that Colonel Chivington, who led that massacre was nothing less than a Methodist pastor; no doubt their Constantinian Jesus would have loved Chivington’s wanton killing of infants for future crimes. Where did the US Army go after the Civil War? Injun hunting – six of the seven divisions went west of the Mississippi – as Zionists know, settler-colonialism can’t dispossess people without keeping up some nasty looming threat of ultimate violence. This led to the brutal murder of “tens of millions of bison” by countless white wetiko losers. Don’t forget: This Wild West violence by gun shitshow started east of the Mississippi not west of it. Don’t buy the hype: genocidal intent you can repeatedly see since the founding of the US.
Roxanne refers to the “settler state of Israel”. You can’t have an effective UN when the five most powerful nations have veto power for ANY resolution (and when two nations get to clearly act as rogue states defying international law). Roxanne says the nasty Doctrine of Discovery is still a fundamental law of the Unites States. Check that out. Jefferson said Doctrine of Discovery was international law – voila! Clear theft backed up by law.
Brazil has more slave-descendants (65,000,000) than the US (41,000,000). However, the Caribbean imported more enslaved Africans than even Brazil. Slave Insurrections and the Haitian Revolution taught the Slave Trade a lesson: you are probably safer these days not importing but breeding your own slaves, so their only memories will be of being captive. The majority of profits from slavery came from “increased value of slaves’ bodies.” Today’s industrial hog and cattle farm owners can look nostalgically back to the forced breeding of black bodies in direct homage. Here’s wonderful party trivia: We know Hugo Boss gained fame designing for the Nazi’s, but did you know Brooks Brothers was heavily involved in the Slave Trade? When you want to adorn your human property to impress fellow racists, who else would you call, but Brooks Brothers?
Bloodhounds were weaponized dogs trained “from pups to identify and hunt black people.” “Wanted” fliers could attract bounty hunters from 100 miles away. A loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment after the Civil War allows the incarceration of blacks in the South as an effective way to place them technically back in slavery (civiliter mortus). US Troops then couldn’t both enforce Reconstruction in the South by staying there, as well as get full-on settler-colonial on the remaining natives out West. The divisions had to choose. So, they went West. Theft of the West (under Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, Custer, et al) easily won out over continuing the now conveniently forgotten “end slavery” motif of the Civil War. In 1871, an Army commander said the entire US Army couldn’t protect the entire South. The Confederate Army would informally reconstitute itself as the Ku Klux Klan.
Here’s a joke: The country that has the most money and recently contributed most violence to wars around the world, is (here’s the punch line) unwilling to allow the refugees it generated to move to the US. Racial codes were invented to justify genocide. Go beyond the 1846 invasion of Mexico and look at the 1806 US spy mission into Mexico in hopes to annex it. See US imperialism as there from inception, and NOT as a period (the way it is taught). Replace the words expansion and manifest destiny with imperialism. Howard Lamar traces US colonialism to the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. Jefferson sent off Lewis & Clark as well as Zebulon Pike on two military missions out West to scout native lands and map military strength and Spanish assets. The first job of the Texas Rangers was ten white men hired to kill resident locals who didn’t voluntarily leave their homes. The Rangers were born as, and long remained, a semi-autonomous ethnic-cleansing machine. 500 Mexicans ended up being lynched by people related to the Texas Rangers. When Marines sing “The Halls of Montezuma…” they actually are glorifying the illegal US invasion of Mexico and brutal six-month occupation involving burning fields and villages and murdering and torturing civilian resisters. Hey, if you can’t sing in a crew cut about being a brutal aggressor defying international law, how else can you be patriotic?
It’s important to know that the Pueblos also have a case against the Spanish for settler-colonialism: they reduced the Pueblo landbase to 5% while reducing the population by 90%. During US desegregation, the longest anti-busing battle happened not in the South, but in Boston (right wing populism).
In 1155, England invades Ireland, but colonization is only completed in 1801. The plantation of Ulster is forced on Ireland and acts as the settler-colonial template for the British. The settlers were Protestant on an all-Catholic island. “Traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and families crushed with debt and hunger.” The Irish Potato Famine (1,000,000+ died) was colonial genocide. The Irish were deemed a surplus population, like the people of the Slavic regions were deemed by Hitler (for lebensraum). Irish food was exported from Ireland by Britain during the famine (Britain did this same forced genocidal famine thing to India and Iran as well). An Ulster Scot scientist wrote the settler-colonial concept out clearly: The race [Celtic] must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still, they must leave. England’s safety requires it.” The solution to Cecil Rhodes for social problems was taking by force new lands “to settle the surplus population”. Cecil said, “The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.” Engels wrote of Ireland that “the country has been completely ruined by the English wars of conquest from 1100 to 1850.”
Who were the settler-colonials in Northern Ireland? The Protestant Scots-Irish. Who were the hung-ho settler-colonialists and the biggest thieves of the hunting grounds and farmlands of Natives on the US drive westward? The Protestant Scots-Irish, had lots of years of prior experience in taking other people’s land by force back in Ireland. In the US, they created a “veritable human shield of colonial civilization.” They were “good foot soldiers” of both empires. After 1840, even the Catholic Scots-Irish joined the settler-colonial bandwagon because settler-colonialism became one of the fastest tickets out of Stigmatown for Irish Catholics in the anti-Catholic United States. The Irish become “white” in the US, by openly becoming patriotic settlers. While committing acts of violence against natives you could sidetrack yourself with the thought that the US once fought England just as you as Irish once fought England. And you could get your brutality out in that kinky new American Style – by clearly violently targeting specifically those who did you no wrong. The fatal mistake of the Irish Catholic settlers was that they did not also see clearly how “settler colonialism in the US was patterned after the English settler-colonialism in Ireland.” Fredrick Douglas after visiting Ireland noted how easily the recently oppressed Irish are “instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro.” As a Quaker and half-Irish reader, learning the role of Protestant Scots-Irish in US settler-colonialism (although before my ancestors arrived) was depressing but important corrective news for me.
If the 150-foot-long DC memorial to US war dead in Vietnam were adjusted to cover the length of the names of the Vietnamese dead instead (with the same font and size), it would be nine miles long. In Hitler’s sequel to Mein Kampf (I’m guessing Dein Kampf?) he accurately called the US a “race-state”. “After World War II, the US was paying 75 percent of the cost of French military operations in Vietnam.” Lieutenant Calley explained after My Lai, “I looked at communism as a southerner looks at a Negro, supposedly. It’s evil. It’s bad.” The US in Laos tried to destroy the Pathet Lao but even after dropping a whopping 2 million tons of cluster bombs, failed pathetically. Did you know that not one, but five US administrations tried to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi of Libya? Ah, the joys of being a shamelessly bipartisan rogue state.
It’s past time to really look at the immigrant’s role in US settler colonialism, and Roxanne’s book is an excellent way to do that. What a perfect book for descendants of immigrants to not just understand settler-colonialism in the US past but also how the Americanization process “sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the indigenous peoples.” I rarely vote a book five stars on Goodreads because it means “amazing”, but this book exactly fills a critical niche that must be filled. Bravo.
In the Smithsonian locked away is a photograph taken by a US Cavalry soldier of an Indian baby lying in a field of snow shredded by a Gatling gun. We are not supposed to see this photo.” The first US immigration law was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The NRA was once a rather benign organization until taken over by the white nationalist Second Amendment Foundation, actually founded by the border chief of “Operation Wetback”. The Second Amendment at that point became a white nationalist cause. The average number of guns by US gun owners today? Eight. Picture westward expansion through native land with “settlers armed to the teeth”. A full third of the continental US was “brutally annexed through a war of conquest” in 1848. Note that: “Trump was not against European immigrants.”
In the hit play “Hamilton”, Hamilton and Lafayette both laughingly proclaim after the battle of Yorktown: “Immigrants: We Get Things Done”. What rubbish. Hamilton was then (1781) a citizen of Great Britain and Lafayette was a French militarist soon to return to France. Miranda’s Hamilton is based on a hagiography written by a guy not even trained in history (Ron Chernow). In real life, Hamilton was a hard liner on the presence of foreigners. Experts on Aaron Burr thought the play depicted Burr wrongly. Burr was a man of the Enlightenment, championing press freedom, criminal justice reform, and the rights of women and immigrants. “George Washington raffled off slave children to pay his debts.” Hamilton sided with the French during the Haitian Revolution and not with the Blacks seeking freedom and liberty. This play wouldn’t dare tell you that Hamilton himself bought and sold slaves; instead, the play Hamilton is a liberal feel-good US origin fantasy which erases both slavery and the indigenous while turning racist founders (signing documents to EXCLUDE all non-whites) conveniently into men of color. No wonder, progressives didn’t buy such selling of the deeds of wealthy white men as musical entertainment, even with the buttered popcorn. Hamilton even talked about sending the US army into Spanish Florida, and then continuing on to Central and South America. What a douchebag.
Our founders were neither oppressed nor colonized. Instead, call them imperialists who envisioned the taking of the entire continent as spoils. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance had provisions taken from prior British settler-colonialism in Ulster. One thing that separated our founders from the British, was that our founders were collectively able to say the rather contradictory expression “empire of liberty” without breaking out laughing.
The primary motive for settler-colonialism is not race, but territory. The US was founded as a “settler-colonial, fiscal military state” promising free land to white males in order to push “recruiting and motivating settlers to squat on Indigenous people’s lands.” Much native land division was done with surveyor’s Gunter chains placed twenty-two yards apart. Daniel Boone is an icon of US settler-colonialism. Our Western Territories stayed territories so long because of clear continued native resistance to US settler-colonialism. Let’s listen to Union General Sherman explaining his US army directives: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children… during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” US state violence clearly against those who committed no crime permeates our history, if you allow yourself to see it. Did you know US military annals STILL lists the Wounded Knee Massacre as a victorious “battle”? Most of us have learned years back about the Trail of Tears under Andrew Jackson but not that the Navajo and Dakota Nations were also forced to march away from their homelands during the Civil War. Remember that it was the theoretical “good” Union side of the Civil War that actually committed the Sand Creek Massacre. Conservative Christians will love that Colonel Chivington, who led that massacre was nothing less than a Methodist pastor; no doubt their Constantinian Jesus would have loved Chivington’s wanton killing of infants for future crimes. Where did the US Army go after the Civil War? Injun hunting – six of the seven divisions went west of the Mississippi – as Zionists know, settler-colonialism can’t dispossess people without keeping up some nasty looming threat of ultimate violence. This led to the brutal murder of “tens of millions of bison” by countless white wetiko losers. Don’t forget: This Wild West violence by gun shitshow started east of the Mississippi not west of it. Don’t buy the hype: genocidal intent you can repeatedly see since the founding of the US.
Roxanne refers to the “settler state of Israel”. You can’t have an effective UN when the five most powerful nations have veto power for ANY resolution (and when two nations get to clearly act as rogue states defying international law). Roxanne says the nasty Doctrine of Discovery is still a fundamental law of the Unites States. Check that out. Jefferson said Doctrine of Discovery was international law – voila! Clear theft backed up by law.
Brazil has more slave-descendants (65,000,000) than the US (41,000,000). However, the Caribbean imported more enslaved Africans than even Brazil. Slave Insurrections and the Haitian Revolution taught the Slave Trade a lesson: you are probably safer these days not importing but breeding your own slaves, so their only memories will be of being captive. The majority of profits from slavery came from “increased value of slaves’ bodies.” Today’s industrial hog and cattle farm owners can look nostalgically back to the forced breeding of black bodies in direct homage. Here’s wonderful party trivia: We know Hugo Boss gained fame designing for the Nazi’s, but did you know Brooks Brothers was heavily involved in the Slave Trade? When you want to adorn your human property to impress fellow racists, who else would you call, but Brooks Brothers?
Bloodhounds were weaponized dogs trained “from pups to identify and hunt black people.” “Wanted” fliers could attract bounty hunters from 100 miles away. A loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment after the Civil War allows the incarceration of blacks in the South as an effective way to place them technically back in slavery (civiliter mortus). US Troops then couldn’t both enforce Reconstruction in the South by staying there, as well as get full-on settler-colonial on the remaining natives out West. The divisions had to choose. So, they went West. Theft of the West (under Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, Custer, et al) easily won out over continuing the now conveniently forgotten “end slavery” motif of the Civil War. In 1871, an Army commander said the entire US Army couldn’t protect the entire South. The Confederate Army would informally reconstitute itself as the Ku Klux Klan.
Here’s a joke: The country that has the most money and recently contributed most violence to wars around the world, is (here’s the punch line) unwilling to allow the refugees it generated to move to the US. Racial codes were invented to justify genocide. Go beyond the 1846 invasion of Mexico and look at the 1806 US spy mission into Mexico in hopes to annex it. See US imperialism as there from inception, and NOT as a period (the way it is taught). Replace the words expansion and manifest destiny with imperialism. Howard Lamar traces US colonialism to the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. Jefferson sent off Lewis & Clark as well as Zebulon Pike on two military missions out West to scout native lands and map military strength and Spanish assets. The first job of the Texas Rangers was ten white men hired to kill resident locals who didn’t voluntarily leave their homes. The Rangers were born as, and long remained, a semi-autonomous ethnic-cleansing machine. 500 Mexicans ended up being lynched by people related to the Texas Rangers. When Marines sing “The Halls of Montezuma…” they actually are glorifying the illegal US invasion of Mexico and brutal six-month occupation involving burning fields and villages and murdering and torturing civilian resisters. Hey, if you can’t sing in a crew cut about being a brutal aggressor defying international law, how else can you be patriotic?
It’s important to know that the Pueblos also have a case against the Spanish for settler-colonialism: they reduced the Pueblo landbase to 5% while reducing the population by 90%. During US desegregation, the longest anti-busing battle happened not in the South, but in Boston (right wing populism).
In 1155, England invades Ireland, but colonization is only completed in 1801. The plantation of Ulster is forced on Ireland and acts as the settler-colonial template for the British. The settlers were Protestant on an all-Catholic island. “Traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and families crushed with debt and hunger.” The Irish Potato Famine (1,000,000+ died) was colonial genocide. The Irish were deemed a surplus population, like the people of the Slavic regions were deemed by Hitler (for lebensraum). Irish food was exported from Ireland by Britain during the famine (Britain did this same forced genocidal famine thing to India and Iran as well). An Ulster Scot scientist wrote the settler-colonial concept out clearly: The race [Celtic] must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still, they must leave. England’s safety requires it.” The solution to Cecil Rhodes for social problems was taking by force new lands “to settle the surplus population”. Cecil said, “The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.” Engels wrote of Ireland that “the country has been completely ruined by the English wars of conquest from 1100 to 1850.”
Who were the settler-colonials in Northern Ireland? The Protestant Scots-Irish. Who were the hung-ho settler-colonialists and the biggest thieves of the hunting grounds and farmlands of Natives on the US drive westward? The Protestant Scots-Irish, had lots of years of prior experience in taking other people’s land by force back in Ireland. In the US, they created a “veritable human shield of colonial civilization.” They were “good foot soldiers” of both empires. After 1840, even the Catholic Scots-Irish joined the settler-colonial bandwagon because settler-colonialism became one of the fastest tickets out of Stigmatown for Irish Catholics in the anti-Catholic United States. The Irish become “white” in the US, by openly becoming patriotic settlers. While committing acts of violence against natives you could sidetrack yourself with the thought that the US once fought England just as you as Irish once fought England. And you could get your brutality out in that kinky new American Style – by clearly violently targeting specifically those who did you no wrong. The fatal mistake of the Irish Catholic settlers was that they did not also see clearly how “settler colonialism in the US was patterned after the English settler-colonialism in Ireland.” Fredrick Douglas after visiting Ireland noted how easily the recently oppressed Irish are “instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro.” As a Quaker and half-Irish reader, learning the role of Protestant Scots-Irish in US settler-colonialism (although before my ancestors arrived) was depressing but important corrective news for me.
If the 150-foot-long DC memorial to US war dead in Vietnam were adjusted to cover the length of the names of the Vietnamese dead instead (with the same font and size), it would be nine miles long. In Hitler’s sequel to Mein Kampf (I’m guessing Dein Kampf?) he accurately called the US a “race-state”. “After World War II, the US was paying 75 percent of the cost of French military operations in Vietnam.” Lieutenant Calley explained after My Lai, “I looked at communism as a southerner looks at a Negro, supposedly. It’s evil. It’s bad.” The US in Laos tried to destroy the Pathet Lao but even after dropping a whopping 2 million tons of cluster bombs, failed pathetically. Did you know that not one, but five US administrations tried to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi of Libya? Ah, the joys of being a shamelessly bipartisan rogue state.
It’s past time to really look at the immigrant’s role in US settler colonialism, and Roxanne’s book is an excellent way to do that. What a perfect book for descendants of immigrants to not just understand settler-colonialism in the US past but also how the Americanization process “sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the indigenous peoples.” I rarely vote a book five stars on Goodreads because it means “amazing”, but this book exactly fills a critical niche that must be filled. Bravo.
March 19, 2023
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is doing the work of writing real history. I often regard Gerald Horne as the greatest living historian for the work he does on settler colonialism and the project of whiteness that was crucial for the establishment of the United States as a country built on genocide and racial slavery. Dunbar-Ortiz continues to add crucial elements to this story, and her follow up to "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" did not disappoint.
I want to focus in on one particular passage, as my reading of it coincidentally aligned with a recent viral post about Ron DeSantis. In it, he claims to identify culturally with "the working class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio...This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving." In Chapter 2 of "Not a Nation of Immigrants," Dunbar-Ortiz critiques J.D. Vance's book "Hillbilly Elegy," particularly how settlers in Appalachia came to self-indigenize themselves and how that distinction from "whites" in the rest of the country gives them cover for their animus toward Black and indigenous communities. When Donald Trump ran for president in 2015, he (and Vance) used egregious racist dog whistles, then pointed to Appalachia to serve as cover for it. DeSantis - an Italian-American born and raised in Florida who attended Ivy league schools - understands the project of whiteness and the importance of this settler ideology, and wants to get ahead of his policies before he runs for president by self-identifying as a working-class Appalachian. As both Dunbar-Ortiz and Horne remind us, this is not just history - it's the present.
The collection of topics in this book may at times feel like a hindrance - it can jump around a lot while covering so much ground - but I still feel that this is an essential read that continues to paint a picture of America that is both honest and to account.
I want to focus in on one particular passage, as my reading of it coincidentally aligned with a recent viral post about Ron DeSantis. In it, he claims to identify culturally with "the working class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio...This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving." In Chapter 2 of "Not a Nation of Immigrants," Dunbar-Ortiz critiques J.D. Vance's book "Hillbilly Elegy," particularly how settlers in Appalachia came to self-indigenize themselves and how that distinction from "whites" in the rest of the country gives them cover for their animus toward Black and indigenous communities. When Donald Trump ran for president in 2015, he (and Vance) used egregious racist dog whistles, then pointed to Appalachia to serve as cover for it. DeSantis - an Italian-American born and raised in Florida who attended Ivy league schools - understands the project of whiteness and the importance of this settler ideology, and wants to get ahead of his policies before he runs for president by self-identifying as a working-class Appalachian. As both Dunbar-Ortiz and Horne remind us, this is not just history - it's the present.
The collection of topics in this book may at times feel like a hindrance - it can jump around a lot while covering so much ground - but I still feel that this is an essential read that continues to paint a picture of America that is both honest and to account.
October 2, 2021
Decided to read this because of the topic. I had read a few of books by the author, had never been particularly a fan of her writing style, but decided it was worth reading what she might have to say.
The premise is probably not difficult to grasp: despite the trope that the United States is one of immigrants, it is actually far more complicated and darker than that. That this was land that was stolen from Native people, and that slaves were brought from Africa to build it is a narrative that does not get discussed remembered enough. Especially when viewed from how people do not understand the historical, societal, political, etc. ramifications that are still felt through this moment.
Overall, I thought this was an extremely strange book. I was put off by the author starting off with Alexander Hamilton and the well-known musical production. I understood the author was trying to make, but it felt weirdly like the author really wanted to talk about the musical instead.
Like the previous books, I found the writing style really tough to get through. Dunbar-Ortiz is not an author for me, although I fully acknowledge she has very important things to say. But I'd definitely supplement this work with something else.
Library borrow for me and that was best.
The premise is probably not difficult to grasp: despite the trope that the United States is one of immigrants, it is actually far more complicated and darker than that. That this was land that was stolen from Native people, and that slaves were brought from Africa to build it is a narrative that does not get discussed remembered enough. Especially when viewed from how people do not understand the historical, societal, political, etc. ramifications that are still felt through this moment.
Overall, I thought this was an extremely strange book. I was put off by the author starting off with Alexander Hamilton and the well-known musical production. I understood the author was trying to make, but it felt weirdly like the author really wanted to talk about the musical instead.
Like the previous books, I found the writing style really tough to get through. Dunbar-Ortiz is not an author for me, although I fully acknowledge she has very important things to say. But I'd definitely supplement this work with something else.
Library borrow for me and that was best.
July 26, 2022
The hard truth: the US is a settler colony, built on the basis of slavery, theft, genocide, white supremacy and militant expansionism. Tough to swallow perhaps, but deal with it. There's no hope of developing a new culture fit for the 21st century without an extensive discussion and deep understanding of the fundamental cultural and political roots beneath the current reality. Dunbar-Ortiz's book is absolutely indispensable in that regard, along with A People's History of the United States, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News―From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean and others.
September 4, 2021
Having liked her previous book, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, I expected to like this book as well. I found its tone to be off-putting and detracting from the power of the story, as well as unfocused and even confusing in its attempt to cover every possible racial and ethnic group in the United States.
January 16, 2024
3.5 ⭐️ — i agree with the overall thesis, but this book didn’t reveal anything new to me personally and it did feel a little disorganized.
my main frustration is the author calling settler-colonial logic a “deep psychosis.” invoking mental illness to describe bigotry is! not! it! i will never accept people defaulting to ableist language as a way of describing right-wing views. it isn’t accurate, it isn’t kind, and it certainly isn’t revolutionary.
i also wasn’t expecting the book to start off by deconstructing Hamilton. everything i’ve ever heard abt that musical has been against my will and i understand it’s used to discuss how many USAmercians view history but i just…. i personally struggle to care at all about hamilton. I know it sucks, i’ve always known it sucks, i’m tired of it.
i read the audiobook, and this is just personal preference, but i strongly dislike when narrators do impressions of the people they quote. that happens a LOT in this book.
the book is also repetitive at times, i.e. the idea of arrivants was introduced and defined twice, which felt unnecessary.
if you don’t understand the depth of the USA’s settler-colonial nature, this may be a good starting point, but it just wasn’t for me.
my main frustration is the author calling settler-colonial logic a “deep psychosis.” invoking mental illness to describe bigotry is! not! it! i will never accept people defaulting to ableist language as a way of describing right-wing views. it isn’t accurate, it isn’t kind, and it certainly isn’t revolutionary.
i also wasn’t expecting the book to start off by deconstructing Hamilton. everything i’ve ever heard abt that musical has been against my will and i understand it’s used to discuss how many USAmercians view history but i just…. i personally struggle to care at all about hamilton. I know it sucks, i’ve always known it sucks, i’m tired of it.
i read the audiobook, and this is just personal preference, but i strongly dislike when narrators do impressions of the people they quote. that happens a LOT in this book.
the book is also repetitive at times, i.e. the idea of arrivants was introduced and defined twice, which felt unnecessary.
if you don’t understand the depth of the USA’s settler-colonial nature, this may be a good starting point, but it just wasn’t for me.
October 14, 2025
HOLY MOLY.
I knew this was going to be about the history of immigration and immigration laws but I did not expect it to go into the nuances of how U.S. imperialism/interventionism, orientalism, and capitalism play into immigration and also how we in the United States view immigration.
I read the authors other book “An Indigenous peoples history of the United States” earlier this year (and loved it) and when I saw some friends talking about this book on nonfiction booktok I thought it sounded interesting but didn’t know exactly where this book was going to go or cover and WOW JUST WOW.
I now have a list of different topics I want to learn more about in 2026 (North Korea, Syria, Mexico, and the Philippines)
I knew this was going to be about the history of immigration and immigration laws but I did not expect it to go into the nuances of how U.S. imperialism/interventionism, orientalism, and capitalism play into immigration and also how we in the United States view immigration.
I read the authors other book “An Indigenous peoples history of the United States” earlier this year (and loved it) and when I saw some friends talking about this book on nonfiction booktok I thought it sounded interesting but didn’t know exactly where this book was going to go or cover and WOW JUST WOW.
I now have a list of different topics I want to learn more about in 2026 (North Korea, Syria, Mexico, and the Philippines)
February 4, 2025
I so wanted to like this book although it has the same problems that her previous books have had only in this one it is much greater. Dunbar-Ortiz provides information and perspective on American history that is not often covered. Her main premise is that we are not a nation of immigrants- as the title states and she makes a fairly convincing argument for that but it seems almost personal for her. When she takes aim at someone, she fires head on. She calls out Ron Chernoff for not being an historian which is fair enough and references the characters in the musical Hamilton for which he was an adviser. She argues that it presented Hamilton as an abolitionist which he definitely was not and also for referring to him as an immigrant when, being from Nevis, a British possession, he was not. But then she also attacks Lin-Manuel Miranda as not an immigrant because he is from Puerto Rico- true enough but why does that matter.?
She also draws some very tenuous, quite ridiculous really, conclusions. For example, she gives a short history of the creation of the Knights of Columbus explaining that it was all about the Irish having bought into settler colonialism as the reason for the name and them implies that to this day they are doing that. I am quite sure that the reason they used that name was that they wanted to seem more American. Moreover, my father was a Fourth Degree Knight and although I never attended any of their meetings, I knew the people in it and I can assure anyone listening that the last thing on the minds of the KC was settler colonialism. They would have no clue what that means. From my perspective, they were all about standing guard at the wakes of members and drinking.
The author has an extensive bibliography and plenty of citations but when I checked a few of the citations, the connection between the content on the page and the source was tenuous at best.
I am sorry to give so few stars because she has some very valuable points to make and I agree with much of it. She needs to be more careful with her citations and restrain herself from drawing conclusions that her evidence just does not support.
She also draws some very tenuous, quite ridiculous really, conclusions. For example, she gives a short history of the creation of the Knights of Columbus explaining that it was all about the Irish having bought into settler colonialism as the reason for the name and them implies that to this day they are doing that. I am quite sure that the reason they used that name was that they wanted to seem more American. Moreover, my father was a Fourth Degree Knight and although I never attended any of their meetings, I knew the people in it and I can assure anyone listening that the last thing on the minds of the KC was settler colonialism. They would have no clue what that means. From my perspective, they were all about standing guard at the wakes of members and drinking.
The author has an extensive bibliography and plenty of citations but when I checked a few of the citations, the connection between the content on the page and the source was tenuous at best.
I am sorry to give so few stars because she has some very valuable points to make and I agree with much of it. She needs to be more careful with her citations and restrain herself from drawing conclusions that her evidence just does not support.
April 23, 2022
The range of this book is truly impressive! Not only the breadth of subject matter that is covered with considerable depth, but also the theoretical rigor throughout. This is the perfect text for someone outside the strict disciplinary boundaries of critical race theory or settler colonial studies, but seeking a more comprehensive and rigorous engagement with decolonial scholarship than is available in pop-anti racism books.
October 5, 2021
(dnf) This book is full of important, rarely discussed, U.S. history, but readers need to be willing to read something more academic than many of the other popular books being published now about racism and colonialism. This isn't a critique at all, the history covered in here deserves somber and thorough treatment. I want to revisit this book again someday, but it's too intense and dense for me to finish right now.
September 12, 2021
4.5. Def important book. scope is very broad though which makes it a little disorganized and there are times where you want more info. very worth the read though!
June 7, 2022
"America is a nation of immigrants! Everyone here came from somewhere else!" I have been hearing variations on this for at least the last two decades. It's a call to come together, for unity. But.. it's also bullshit.
So, here's a secret: I don't like the smash broadway musical Hamilton. I think it is exceptionally bad history and I agree with Dr. Ishmael Reed that much of its lyrics are corny. Hamilton styles itself as an immigrant story and the first chapter of Dunbar-Ortiz's book dissects the ways in which the musical deliberately misrepresents this history and twists the reality of immigration in the US. To be honest, it's initially why I bought the book in the first place. Come for the searing trashing of Hamilton, stay for the enlightening discourse.
Immigration is extremely complicated in a Settler Colonial state. While everyone here may have come from somewhere else, we can certainly identify certain peoples who have been here since time immemorial and had a significant head start on the recent crop. And the "Nation of Immigrants" rhetoric erases them and forgets the centuries of genocide that Europeans conducted against First Nations people. The process of immigration in Dunbar-Ortiz's book is likened to a recruitment of an army for pushing the indigenous off their lands. And I can even remember this in my own grade school education. Europeans took over North America because of the greater number of people flooding in through immigration and the Indigenous just couldn't match that population is something I recall reading in those text books. It conveniently ignores the apocalyptic death brought on by European contact and that between 1491 and 1605 something like 90% or more of the inhabitants of North America were killed by disease and warfare from the European colonizers. One of the foundational cities of the United States was founded on an indigenous ghost town that had been wiped out by small pox. The United States broke treaties and parceled out land to drive First Nations people across the continent. This continues today with the Standing Rock protests of First Nations people resisting the routing of a poisonous pipeline through what little land has been alotted to them.
The "Nation of Immigrants" rhetoric also ignores the stark reality of immigration. We are brought up being told that immigrants come to the US seeking freedom or opportunity. It's a hopeful experience that would only work out positively for everyone in the melting pot of the US. The truth is that mass immigration generally only happens because the country people are living has become uninhabitable. Irish immigrated to the US because they were being starved in Ireland and the people doing it decided it would be easier to ship them somewhere else than to stop exploiting them. For much of the past 100+ years, immigration from South America has been driven but the US's habit of sanctioning and funding coups in any country that so much as glances left. Dunbar-Ortiz recounts numerous US-backed coups of duly elected governments that go back to some white guys toppling a country because they wanted to make a south american slave state in the mid 19th century. Indeed, an incredible amount US territory was taken from Mexico, feeding into a truly mind boggling situation where settler colonial descendants of spanish colonizers had their land taken from them and have petitioned for redress. Though in this mix, they also forgot the indigenous people from whom the land was taken first.
Once here, immigrants (especially non-white immigrants) receive harsh treatment. Despite its lofty aspirations in hindsight, the US has never really stood prepared to receive the wretched refuse of any teeming shore with open arms. We tend to use bats.
Dunbar-Ortiz's book is excellently researched with a ton of annotations covering the entire breadth of the immigrant experience in the US, particularly in the wake of the US's endless interventions and invasions. It tells the often unheard story of the results of these interventions. We hear constantly of people coming to the US for a better life, seeking prosperity if they but work hard enough. We don't hear nearly as often stories about people fleeing countries we destabilized. Much was made in the recent evacuation of Afghanistan for making sure we got out the people who helped the US military there. But less was said of the fact that, many more had been fleeing simply because we made the country a war torn hell for nearly half a century (because, of course, it really first began when the US started funding proxies against the Soviet Union when they invaded).
The creation and persistence of the United States of America has been built upon and fosters great evil and it has to stop. We can't keep consoling ourselves with pretty little lies to preserve our comfort. And, indeed, that comfort often comes at a cost paid by others.
So, here's a secret: I don't like the smash broadway musical Hamilton. I think it is exceptionally bad history and I agree with Dr. Ishmael Reed that much of its lyrics are corny. Hamilton styles itself as an immigrant story and the first chapter of Dunbar-Ortiz's book dissects the ways in which the musical deliberately misrepresents this history and twists the reality of immigration in the US. To be honest, it's initially why I bought the book in the first place. Come for the searing trashing of Hamilton, stay for the enlightening discourse.
Immigration is extremely complicated in a Settler Colonial state. While everyone here may have come from somewhere else, we can certainly identify certain peoples who have been here since time immemorial and had a significant head start on the recent crop. And the "Nation of Immigrants" rhetoric erases them and forgets the centuries of genocide that Europeans conducted against First Nations people. The process of immigration in Dunbar-Ortiz's book is likened to a recruitment of an army for pushing the indigenous off their lands. And I can even remember this in my own grade school education. Europeans took over North America because of the greater number of people flooding in through immigration and the Indigenous just couldn't match that population is something I recall reading in those text books. It conveniently ignores the apocalyptic death brought on by European contact and that between 1491 and 1605 something like 90% or more of the inhabitants of North America were killed by disease and warfare from the European colonizers. One of the foundational cities of the United States was founded on an indigenous ghost town that had been wiped out by small pox. The United States broke treaties and parceled out land to drive First Nations people across the continent. This continues today with the Standing Rock protests of First Nations people resisting the routing of a poisonous pipeline through what little land has been alotted to them.
The "Nation of Immigrants" rhetoric also ignores the stark reality of immigration. We are brought up being told that immigrants come to the US seeking freedom or opportunity. It's a hopeful experience that would only work out positively for everyone in the melting pot of the US. The truth is that mass immigration generally only happens because the country people are living has become uninhabitable. Irish immigrated to the US because they were being starved in Ireland and the people doing it decided it would be easier to ship them somewhere else than to stop exploiting them. For much of the past 100+ years, immigration from South America has been driven but the US's habit of sanctioning and funding coups in any country that so much as glances left. Dunbar-Ortiz recounts numerous US-backed coups of duly elected governments that go back to some white guys toppling a country because they wanted to make a south american slave state in the mid 19th century. Indeed, an incredible amount US territory was taken from Mexico, feeding into a truly mind boggling situation where settler colonial descendants of spanish colonizers had their land taken from them and have petitioned for redress. Though in this mix, they also forgot the indigenous people from whom the land was taken first.
Once here, immigrants (especially non-white immigrants) receive harsh treatment. Despite its lofty aspirations in hindsight, the US has never really stood prepared to receive the wretched refuse of any teeming shore with open arms. We tend to use bats.
Dunbar-Ortiz's book is excellently researched with a ton of annotations covering the entire breadth of the immigrant experience in the US, particularly in the wake of the US's endless interventions and invasions. It tells the often unheard story of the results of these interventions. We hear constantly of people coming to the US for a better life, seeking prosperity if they but work hard enough. We don't hear nearly as often stories about people fleeing countries we destabilized. Much was made in the recent evacuation of Afghanistan for making sure we got out the people who helped the US military there. But less was said of the fact that, many more had been fleeing simply because we made the country a war torn hell for nearly half a century (because, of course, it really first began when the US started funding proxies against the Soviet Union when they invaded).
The creation and persistence of the United States of America has been built upon and fosters great evil and it has to stop. We can't keep consoling ourselves with pretty little lies to preserve our comfort. And, indeed, that comfort often comes at a cost paid by others.
August 16, 2025
Excellent overall, but weirdly little time is spent on the decolonization piece (it really only receives attention in the final chapter) while a huge segment of the first third of the book boils down to “Don’t base your understanding of history on broadway musicals.”
Audiobook narrator Shaun Taylor-Corbett also does impressions of various US presidents when they’re quoted, which was a very odd performance choice. It took away from the seriousness of the material because they sounded so much like comedy sketch parody impressions, which is more than a little jarring when they’re in the middle of discussing crimes against humanity.
Audiobook narrator Shaun Taylor-Corbett also does impressions of various US presidents when they’re quoted, which was a very odd performance choice. It took away from the seriousness of the material because they sounded so much like comedy sketch parody impressions, which is more than a little jarring when they’re in the middle of discussing crimes against humanity.
March 20, 2022
“The United States has never been ‘a nation of immigrants.’ It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, and German. The vortex of settler colonialism sucked immigrants through a kind of seasoning process of Americanization . . . .”
This quote comes from the first paragraph in this book’s Conclusion. It occurs almost word for word in its beginning and elsewhere throughout the book. The rest of the book mainly gives examples of this claim. In short, I suppose this is good construction: state your thesis and then support by argument and examples.
If you, the potential reader, have any illusions left about American exceptionalism, be warned: Dunbar-Ortiz is out to smash them, unless by exceptionalism you are thinking exceptionally bad.
Dunbar-Ortiz has three main points and many expansions thereon. No modifications, though. And not to mention the overriding thread running throughout her book – the Indigenous people of the continent and the Black slaves that were brought to the continent of course were not immigrants but conquered by the settlers so that they could take their land or brought and bought by the settlers to provide them with free labor. Her three major points, woven in and out throughout her book are these:
1. The first Europeans to come to America came not as immigrants but as settlers, as settler colonialists. As with all colonialists, they took land away from the people who were already on the land they wanted, set up their own colonies excluding the original or Indigenous people there, and killed those who resisted them. They were not immigrants; they did not try to adapt to the culture to which they were coming. They came to settle and to dominate. And that pattern did not stop with the first settlers (Pilgrims, Puritans, early explorers who claimed their rights to land they did not own under the “Doctrine of Discovery”); the pattern continued until these usurpers reached the farthest opposite coast, appropriating the land of the Native Americans and going to war for the land long occupied by Mexicans under the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” America was founded in violence and it has been imperialist since its inception.
2. But didn’t some immigrants come later, such as the Irish, the Scots, Germans, and other Europeans? Well, yes, these Europeans came later but they quickly became “settler colonialists.” The Scots Irish for example settled in Appalachia and soon were referred to as indigenous to that area, as if the land was vacant when they came and settled. As to the Irish, “despite their lowly state, . . . “ because the majority were light-skinned in a US culture obsessed with whiteness, they became US Americans inheriting the privileges of white settlers.” To inherit these privileges, the new arrivals not only had to be light skinned but also very patriotic. The Irish were. “A major factor in Irish acceptance of US patriotism was Irish republicanism, as they saw the United States as a prior colony of Britain that revolted and became a republic, not recognizing the settler colonialism in the US that was patterned after the English settler colonialism in Ireland.” More or less the same pattern is repeated with other “immigrants” from other European countries. Through a kind of “seasoning process” they became Americanized. The same was not true for people from African or Asian countries or from other non-white/light-skinned countries. Immigration exclusion acts were frequently passed against Asians (usually the Chinese); often attempts, sometimes successful, were made to deport them not for their misdeeds but because they didn’t belong, and a recent President rode to the Presidency by proclaiming that Mexicans who were coming to the US were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And once in the Presidency, made anti-Muslim bigotry an official policy as well as Muslim exclusion.
3. But you want to argue, what about the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Laos? Aren’t they/weren’t they immigrants? No, Dunbar-Ortiz says, in main they were refugees from wars that the US started.
Dunbar-Ortiz’ argument for America being a land of settler colonialism and against the belief that America is a nation of immigrants morphs into the concept of White racism: Who gets to be an American? She argues early in her book:
“It is essential to understand that aggressive white nationalism and settler colonialism form the bedrock of US institutions and historical and continuing white nationalism . . . and that genocidal policy toward Indigenous nation and descendants of enslaved Africans always looms inside the US and has been extended globally by genocidal US policies and wars in the Pacific and the Caribbean, including Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and increasingly in Africa.”
Such attitudes, often transformed into laws and policies, kept non-white people on the outside, kept them from being fully accepted as equal to white Americans, and/or fully accepted as American at all. She discusses President Theodore Roosevelt’s views extensively:
“In his view, all the darker people were inferior, particularly Native Americans, who were destined to disappear completely. But he also regarded poor whites as inferior . . . . He theorized that a new race was born with testing of settlers’ survival skills in nature, creating a new kind of aristocracy destined to rule the world. The settler ‘stock’ that morphed into that superior species, Roosevelt asserted, was composed of Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, French Huguenots, and Germans and Dutch Protestants. . . . ‘If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined, . . . carrying with it to the grave those potencies upon which realization of man’s highest hope depends.’”
And in 1908, a year after anti-Asian riots took place all along the Pacific coast, “President Theodore Roosevelt called for ‘unity of action’ among the Anglo states of the US, Canada, Australia, and Britain to promote a ‘White Pacific,’ in which white supremacy would dominate against ascendant Japanese power. Roosevelt dispatched the US Navy’s sixteen-battleship Pacific tour to demonstrate Anglo unity against the yellow peril that Japanese immigration represented. Roosevelt told a reporter for the ‘New York Times’ that the fleet would confirm that New Zealand and Australia were ‘white man’s countries.’ ”
The term “yellow peril” was most often used to refer to the Chinese but we see it could be extended to include other Asians as well. A variation on this theme occurred when a deadly flu broke out in 1954, a flu that did not originate in Asia, Dunbar-Ortiz says, nonetheless was dubbed the “Asian flu.” (That this flu did not originate in China is one of Dunbar-Ortiz’ more questionable claims, but I include it here to demonstrate her sometimes, but not often, dubious claims.) And the current coronavirus, in all likelihood originating in Wuhan, China, commonly referred to as the Wuhan virus, has revealed the conditional nature of being an American if one is non-white. This is not a refutable claim. Violence has spiked against Chinese, who have lived in the U.S. for years, calling on them to “go home,” as if the U.S. has not long been their home. Another glaring example is the treatment of Japanese American citizens during WW II. They were not given their citizens rights of due process before being interned for the duration of the war unlike German Americans who were not interned. As Dunbar-Ortiz expands elsewhere in her book:
“Like the Chinese and Mexican immigrants before them [referring to a diverse range of people who came to the U.S.], they experienced racialization, thereby lacking a key element of settler colonialism: potential whiteness. They or their children could become thoroughly Americanized but still remain contingent, even the son of a Kenyan who was twice elected President but whose citizenship was questioned by a substantial part of the population, including by the US president who followed him.’’
So, in sum, it’s not that American has NO immigrants but, in the end, they are not fully American. And it is preferred that they come from countries like Norway, not from “shit-hole countries” in Africa. (Why Donald Trump thought Norwegians would want to immigrate to his America is left unsaid by him.)
This is certainly not a book without merit. It rightly challenges us to look more honestly and more critically at our history and our tendency to congratulate ourselves on being "the greatest country in the world." The book is generally very well researched and documented. It is also fairly repetitive and perhaps tries to do too much, making the arguments sometimes feel like an overreach. The final two chapters might have been eliminated entirely. Sometimes I felt the repetitive nature of the book might have come from its chapters being part of other essays the author had written and then stuffed them into this book, but I do not know that.
As a final note, it seemed to me that Aaron Burr is the only person in U.S. history that the author truly liked. She trashes Alexander Hamilton and the musical (!), writing that history and the musical left out, sanitized, or ignored the anti-immigrant nature of Hamilton’s beliefs and actions. Burr, on the other hand, she lauds as being devoted to the principles of the Enlightenment. She does not add that our slave-owning founders were as well. I might add that the same criticism is true of her book. In smashing the immigrant myths we have grown up with, she also ignores or deliberately leaves out some of the positive features of immigrant policies in America.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
P.S. It may not be relevant but I was interested to learn that Dunbar-Ortiz considers herself to be of Indigenous heritage. She grew up in Central Oklahoma, the daughter of a sharecropper of Scots-Irish ancestry and a mother that Dunbar believes to have been partially Native American, although her mother never claimed to be Native and Dunbar-Ortiz grew up without any Native heritage. She has claimed that her mother denied her Native roots because she married Dunbar's father, a white tenant farmer.
Dunbar-Ortiz is the author of several acclaimed history books, a former university professor, and now retired, a widely traveled lecturer and writer.
This quote comes from the first paragraph in this book’s Conclusion. It occurs almost word for word in its beginning and elsewhere throughout the book. The rest of the book mainly gives examples of this claim. In short, I suppose this is good construction: state your thesis and then support by argument and examples.
If you, the potential reader, have any illusions left about American exceptionalism, be warned: Dunbar-Ortiz is out to smash them, unless by exceptionalism you are thinking exceptionally bad.
Dunbar-Ortiz has three main points and many expansions thereon. No modifications, though. And not to mention the overriding thread running throughout her book – the Indigenous people of the continent and the Black slaves that were brought to the continent of course were not immigrants but conquered by the settlers so that they could take their land or brought and bought by the settlers to provide them with free labor. Her three major points, woven in and out throughout her book are these:
1. The first Europeans to come to America came not as immigrants but as settlers, as settler colonialists. As with all colonialists, they took land away from the people who were already on the land they wanted, set up their own colonies excluding the original or Indigenous people there, and killed those who resisted them. They were not immigrants; they did not try to adapt to the culture to which they were coming. They came to settle and to dominate. And that pattern did not stop with the first settlers (Pilgrims, Puritans, early explorers who claimed their rights to land they did not own under the “Doctrine of Discovery”); the pattern continued until these usurpers reached the farthest opposite coast, appropriating the land of the Native Americans and going to war for the land long occupied by Mexicans under the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” America was founded in violence and it has been imperialist since its inception.
2. But didn’t some immigrants come later, such as the Irish, the Scots, Germans, and other Europeans? Well, yes, these Europeans came later but they quickly became “settler colonialists.” The Scots Irish for example settled in Appalachia and soon were referred to as indigenous to that area, as if the land was vacant when they came and settled. As to the Irish, “despite their lowly state, . . . “ because the majority were light-skinned in a US culture obsessed with whiteness, they became US Americans inheriting the privileges of white settlers.” To inherit these privileges, the new arrivals not only had to be light skinned but also very patriotic. The Irish were. “A major factor in Irish acceptance of US patriotism was Irish republicanism, as they saw the United States as a prior colony of Britain that revolted and became a republic, not recognizing the settler colonialism in the US that was patterned after the English settler colonialism in Ireland.” More or less the same pattern is repeated with other “immigrants” from other European countries. Through a kind of “seasoning process” they became Americanized. The same was not true for people from African or Asian countries or from other non-white/light-skinned countries. Immigration exclusion acts were frequently passed against Asians (usually the Chinese); often attempts, sometimes successful, were made to deport them not for their misdeeds but because they didn’t belong, and a recent President rode to the Presidency by proclaiming that Mexicans who were coming to the US were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And once in the Presidency, made anti-Muslim bigotry an official policy as well as Muslim exclusion.
3. But you want to argue, what about the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Laos? Aren’t they/weren’t they immigrants? No, Dunbar-Ortiz says, in main they were refugees from wars that the US started.
Dunbar-Ortiz’ argument for America being a land of settler colonialism and against the belief that America is a nation of immigrants morphs into the concept of White racism: Who gets to be an American? She argues early in her book:
“It is essential to understand that aggressive white nationalism and settler colonialism form the bedrock of US institutions and historical and continuing white nationalism . . . and that genocidal policy toward Indigenous nation and descendants of enslaved Africans always looms inside the US and has been extended globally by genocidal US policies and wars in the Pacific and the Caribbean, including Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and increasingly in Africa.”
Such attitudes, often transformed into laws and policies, kept non-white people on the outside, kept them from being fully accepted as equal to white Americans, and/or fully accepted as American at all. She discusses President Theodore Roosevelt’s views extensively:
“In his view, all the darker people were inferior, particularly Native Americans, who were destined to disappear completely. But he also regarded poor whites as inferior . . . . He theorized that a new race was born with testing of settlers’ survival skills in nature, creating a new kind of aristocracy destined to rule the world. The settler ‘stock’ that morphed into that superior species, Roosevelt asserted, was composed of Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, French Huguenots, and Germans and Dutch Protestants. . . . ‘If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined, . . . carrying with it to the grave those potencies upon which realization of man’s highest hope depends.’”
And in 1908, a year after anti-Asian riots took place all along the Pacific coast, “President Theodore Roosevelt called for ‘unity of action’ among the Anglo states of the US, Canada, Australia, and Britain to promote a ‘White Pacific,’ in which white supremacy would dominate against ascendant Japanese power. Roosevelt dispatched the US Navy’s sixteen-battleship Pacific tour to demonstrate Anglo unity against the yellow peril that Japanese immigration represented. Roosevelt told a reporter for the ‘New York Times’ that the fleet would confirm that New Zealand and Australia were ‘white man’s countries.’ ”
The term “yellow peril” was most often used to refer to the Chinese but we see it could be extended to include other Asians as well. A variation on this theme occurred when a deadly flu broke out in 1954, a flu that did not originate in Asia, Dunbar-Ortiz says, nonetheless was dubbed the “Asian flu.” (That this flu did not originate in China is one of Dunbar-Ortiz’ more questionable claims, but I include it here to demonstrate her sometimes, but not often, dubious claims.) And the current coronavirus, in all likelihood originating in Wuhan, China, commonly referred to as the Wuhan virus, has revealed the conditional nature of being an American if one is non-white. This is not a refutable claim. Violence has spiked against Chinese, who have lived in the U.S. for years, calling on them to “go home,” as if the U.S. has not long been their home. Another glaring example is the treatment of Japanese American citizens during WW II. They were not given their citizens rights of due process before being interned for the duration of the war unlike German Americans who were not interned. As Dunbar-Ortiz expands elsewhere in her book:
“Like the Chinese and Mexican immigrants before them [referring to a diverse range of people who came to the U.S.], they experienced racialization, thereby lacking a key element of settler colonialism: potential whiteness. They or their children could become thoroughly Americanized but still remain contingent, even the son of a Kenyan who was twice elected President but whose citizenship was questioned by a substantial part of the population, including by the US president who followed him.’’
So, in sum, it’s not that American has NO immigrants but, in the end, they are not fully American. And it is preferred that they come from countries like Norway, not from “shit-hole countries” in Africa. (Why Donald Trump thought Norwegians would want to immigrate to his America is left unsaid by him.)
This is certainly not a book without merit. It rightly challenges us to look more honestly and more critically at our history and our tendency to congratulate ourselves on being "the greatest country in the world." The book is generally very well researched and documented. It is also fairly repetitive and perhaps tries to do too much, making the arguments sometimes feel like an overreach. The final two chapters might have been eliminated entirely. Sometimes I felt the repetitive nature of the book might have come from its chapters being part of other essays the author had written and then stuffed them into this book, but I do not know that.
As a final note, it seemed to me that Aaron Burr is the only person in U.S. history that the author truly liked. She trashes Alexander Hamilton and the musical (!), writing that history and the musical left out, sanitized, or ignored the anti-immigrant nature of Hamilton’s beliefs and actions. Burr, on the other hand, she lauds as being devoted to the principles of the Enlightenment. She does not add that our slave-owning founders were as well. I might add that the same criticism is true of her book. In smashing the immigrant myths we have grown up with, she also ignores or deliberately leaves out some of the positive features of immigrant policies in America.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
P.S. It may not be relevant but I was interested to learn that Dunbar-Ortiz considers herself to be of Indigenous heritage. She grew up in Central Oklahoma, the daughter of a sharecropper of Scots-Irish ancestry and a mother that Dunbar believes to have been partially Native American, although her mother never claimed to be Native and Dunbar-Ortiz grew up without any Native heritage. She has claimed that her mother denied her Native roots because she married Dunbar's father, a white tenant farmer.
Dunbar-Ortiz is the author of several acclaimed history books, a former university professor, and now retired, a widely traveled lecturer and writer.
November 22, 2021
Finished Not a Nation of Immigrants just in time for Thanksgiving! Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the American claim to be a “nation of immigrants” is a founding myth of the U.S. used to obscure the fact that the U.S. was founded as a white settler society that was based on the ethnic cleansing of native peoples, saying “If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.” It’s not that immigration is not important in U.S. history, but rather that immigration is not the defining characteristic of the United States. Not a Nation of Immigrants also points out that many of the immigrants who came & come to America are refugees, who are often fleeing crises that the U.S. fueled or instigated. The endnotes are mostly worth reading for further reading recommendations on the topics covered. Dunbar-Ortiz cites many interesting authors & titles. The first chapter about the musical Hamilton really drew me into the book. Not a Nation of Immigrants is a great intro to looking at the world through a de-colonial perspective.
Read
April 8, 2022I don't think it would truly be fair to give this book a star rating. It's like a five on the importance of the concept, a two on the read/listenability of it and a four for making me think but I had to grit my teeth to get through it, and not because of the damning truths but because it is dense and dry. I appreciate both all the hard facts and statistics as well as why the author had to back up their thesis with the numbers and citations - it just makes for such an impenetrable book and I fear they may lose less committed readers
May 12, 2024
This book is heavy and enlightening. It captures American history as a settler colonial project that has rebranded itself as a “nation of immigrants” pulling on modern day multiculturalism to avoid discussions of slavery, native erasure and slaughter, colonialism of Mexico and Puerto Rico, involvement in international wars resulting in refugees who are then turned away at the American border and interment camps for Japanese Americans, amomg other things. This book reads like an essay collection, that support the central thesis without having much of through line between them. This makes each chapter very readable.
The only thing that is missing for me is an understanding of who the author is, where she is coming from and what motivated her to put together this book (there is no such information in the book, the intro or an appendix). This is what makes it feel a bit more like a text book.
-> Self-indigenization
“They write of the "colonizers" manifesting racism against an Indigenous population, referring to the white settler population, which the authors refer to as "the colonized." The authors analogize regional development organizations to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, claiming that the white population lives "on the Appalachian Reservation." Pearson notes that this is a comparison also made by other white Appalachian scholars. Most disturbing is that Lewis and Knipe treat the original invasion of the Scots Irish squatters as peaceful settlement rather than genocidal violence.
They portray an empty landscape that the settlers occupied, the Indigenous peoples somehow having disappeared with white settlers inheriting indigeneity and the land.”
“Settler self-indigenizing is not limited to Appalachia, * Under the guise of "regional studies," descendants of Appalachian and other early settlers who migrated west and settled in Missour, Oklahoma, and Texas, many of whom trekked on to the valleys of California and the Pacific Northwest, also carry with them the sense of being of the original people and often express an affinity for their version of Indianness, being men who claim "to know Indians." Another site is the intermountain west where white cattle barons dominate, many of them Mormon, who have their own indigenous origin story blessed by their God.”
-> Arrivants vs. Settlers
“In 1607, the English settlers had invaded what they called Jamestown, bringing with them Irish, Welsh, and Scots individuals who were indentured under contracts for various lengths of time. Their conditions of labor were exploitative and often cruel, but ultimately they were free to be social equals with the other English settlers. European indentured servants did not arrive as settlers, but they became settlers.”
“By 186o, there were a half million free Black people in the United States. In the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln also entertained a scheme to get rid of emancipated Black people." Johnson writes, "The history of the nineteenth-century United States was marked by repeated efforts to expatriate free blacks, to identity the space of US national sovereignty with the process of white racial purification, and to harness the property (in the form of the value of enslaved people) to the purpose of white supremacy."
-> Continental imperialism/ America as coloniser
“In 1803, the Jefferson administration, without consulting any affected Indigenous nation, purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte. The 828,000 square miles doubled the size of the United States. The territory encompassed all or part of multiple Indigenous nations, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arap-aho, Crow, Pawnee, Ponca, Osage, Arikara, and Comanche, among other peoples of the bison. It also included the area that would soon be designated Indian Territory (Oklahoma), the site of forced relocation of Indigenous peoples from east of the Mississippi in the 1840S. Fifteen states would be carved out of the Louisiana Territory during the following decades—all of present-day Arkansas, Mis-souri, lowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska; Minnesota west of the Mississippi; most of North and South Dakota; northeastern New México and north Texas; the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide; and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the city of New Orleans.”
“Members of the provincial Hispano elite were not only silent partners to foreign land ventures; they too prospered with the opening of the Santa Fé trade and acquired increased landholdings. Already controlling vast amounts of land that Spain had appropriated from the Indigenous Pueblos and disbursed through land grants, the leading families of New México continued to prosper from cartle and sheep operations, with the added element of money exchange, which allowed them to accumulate capital for trading ventures.”
“Between 1840 and the 1920s, the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement in the United States, along with vigilantes and white citizen mobs, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican Americans and killed thousands more in Texas and in the former Mexican lands that became the states of New México, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.”
“In a true reign of terror, US occupation and settlement saw the extermination of more than one hundred thousand California Native people in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by 1870. Described by scholars as the most extreme demographic disaster of all time, it has also been defined as genocide in terms of the Genocide Convention. " From the onset of the California gold rush, crazed "gold bugs" invaded Indigenous territo-ries, terrorizing and brutally killing those who were in their path.
The settlers ran roughshod over unarmed indigenous residents of fishing communities in a bountiful paradise of woods, rivers, and mountains, as well as former Mexican citizens who were farmers or ranchers. The role left for the US Army was to round up the strewing Indigenous refugees to transport them to already established resee vations in Oregon and Oklahoma.”
“Laura Gómez uses the term "double colonization," explaining that with the US annexation of half of México, in New México the various groups were obligated to deal with various "ra-cial regimes" at the same time—the Hispano, Pueblos, and other Indigenous groups within the Anglo-American racial order and the influx of Anglo settlers. Double colonization refers to Hispanos being descendants of the Spanish colonizers who appropriated most of the Pueblos territory, then themselves were colonized by the United States, thereby losing much of their landholdings, while Pueblos experienced a new solonize on top of the old Hispano one.”
-> Irish American Identity and Racial Hierarchy
“By the time of the famine that began in 1845, impoverished and colonized Ireland had already been bleeding its population through emigration, mostly to the United States. By the 183os, Irish Catholics outnumbered Scots Irish Protestants in the United States. By 1840, Irish Catholic immigrants constituted a third of the immigrant population, which increased to half the immigrant population with the arrival of the famine refugees after 1845.”
“Despite their lowly state, the Irish refugees, because the majority were light-skinned in a US culture obsessed with white-ness, became US Americans inheriting the privileges of white settler.
The stigma of Catholicism was resolved through settler-colonial extreme patriotism, which they came to embrace?* A major factor in Irish acceptance of US patriotism was Irish republicanism, as they saw the United States as a prior colony of Britain that revolted and became a republic, not recognizing the settler colonialism in the Us that was patterned after the English settler colonialism in Ireland.”
-> Asian Americans and Yellow Peril
“The first Chinese gold seekers numbered around three hun-dred, arriving in Northern California in 1849, then more than four hundred joined them. The numbers increased every year, so that in 1852, there were some twenty thousand Chinese in the gold fields.
With the construction of the first continental railroad, beginning in 1865, Chinese workers were recruited, and in 1870, there were sixty-three thousand Chinese in the US-three-fourths in California and others in parts of the country along the railroad routes as well as in northeastern cities. By 1870, Chinese immigrants made up nearly a third of the total population of Idaho, to percent in Mon-tana, and 9 percent in California, where they comprised a quarte of the entire workforce.”
“That law was the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, which suspended Chinese immigration for a ten-year period and barred resident Chinese from US citizenship, and in 1902, was renewed indefinitely. The laws were widely evaded. Exclusion was repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943, which allowed ros Chinese individuals to enter per year.”
“Historian Mae Ngai explains that the animosity of white people toward Filipinos was distinct from the ongoing Asian exclusion, first, because Orientalist characterizations didn't easily fit. Filipinos were Christians and spoke American English, wore Western clothes, and were fluent in US popular culture.”
“Three days after the Pearl Harbor attack, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover reported that 1,29 Japanese—367 in the Hawaii colomy, 924 in the United States—had been detained, along with 857 Ger mans and 147 Italians. Hoover, no flaming liberal, opined that mass internment of Japanese could not be justified on the basis of secu-rity." The Germans and Italians who were detained had been under surveillance for some time and clearly had ties with the Nazi and Fascist regimes, but the nearly thirteen hundred detained Japanese Americans had no such complicity.”
“And, as in all US wars, the Christian missionaries poured in to exploit the trauma and destitution of the targeted population.
US Americans have attempted to atone for the wreckage caused by their government and rushed to adopt orphans, adopting more than four thousand Korean children between 1955 and 1961. Some were
"GI babies" with US military fathers. Twenty-nine percent of South Koreans were Christians, so Christian missions played a large role in facilitating the adoptions."
“In 1964, when the US military mobilized for war in Vietnam. only 603 Vietnamese people lived in the United States, and they were students, teachers, and diplomats. By the turn of the rwenty-first century, there were some two million US citizens of Vietnamese descent, 40 percent living in California, nearly all of them among or descended from the half million war refugees.”
“Laos was officially neutral during the US war in Vietnam, based on a neutraliry agreement signed in 1962 by the United States, China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and ten other countries, forbidding signees from invading Laos or establishing military bases there. But the US ran a covert war in Laos for nine years, 1964-1973, called the
"Secret War in Laos," which was secret to no one except the US pub-lic. During that time, the United States Air Force bombed nearly er ery inch of Laotian territory to annihilate the Pathet Lao, which they failed to do — the Pathet Lao took power in 1975, and Laos remains a socialist country. US planes dropped over two million tons of clus ter bombs on the country, more bombs than all the ones dropped during World War II. No country has ever been bombed so heavily and for so long.”
-> The Wall
“The 1924 immigration law also created the US Border Patrol, housed in the Department of Labor, clearly targeting those crossing the US-México border, at the time seeking to bar the entrance of Chinese. Between 1900 and 1930, some seven hundred thousand Mexican migrants entered the US legally, while many others entered without documents. Most migrants worked seasonally and returned to their villages in México, which growers encouraged. As one California grower put it, after harvest "I will kick them out."? And that is exactly what happened on a large scale beginning in 1930.
Agribusiness employers in the Southwest preferred Mexican seasonal migrant workers, because at the end of harvest, the workers were on their own, without pay or housing during the winter season.
The migrants who chose to stay would relocate to cities where charities or local governments would provide relief during the periods there was no work. This shifted the expenses from employers to the public, which caused resentment, mostly toward the workers. But the caregivers also complained about the employers.”
“Between 1981 and 1990, some one million refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala crossed the México-US border, fleeing the violence in their countries. By 1982, some two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand refugees from El Salvador—a country of only five million people-and tens of thousands of Guatemalans had fled to the US. Under the 1980 Refugee Act and international law, they had the right to asylum, but the migrants' applications were turned down, while there was no limit on those claiming asylum from socialist Cuba and Nicaragua, or the European socialist states, 10s The Reagan administration categorized the refugees as
*economic migrants," maintaining that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments had not violated their human rights. The administration only increased deportation. Of more than six thousand «lum petitions in 1981, 154 were considered and only to granted, while a thousand were deported.”
“The US Fish and Wildlife Service warned that an impermeable barrier and bright light at night will destroy many endangered species." Joseph Nevins writes, "The Border, strictusenso, is a state-sanctioned system of violence: Physical, environmental, ecanom and cultural,"
The only thing that is missing for me is an understanding of who the author is, where she is coming from and what motivated her to put together this book (there is no such information in the book, the intro or an appendix). This is what makes it feel a bit more like a text book.
-> Self-indigenization
“They write of the "colonizers" manifesting racism against an Indigenous population, referring to the white settler population, which the authors refer to as "the colonized." The authors analogize regional development organizations to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, claiming that the white population lives "on the Appalachian Reservation." Pearson notes that this is a comparison also made by other white Appalachian scholars. Most disturbing is that Lewis and Knipe treat the original invasion of the Scots Irish squatters as peaceful settlement rather than genocidal violence.
They portray an empty landscape that the settlers occupied, the Indigenous peoples somehow having disappeared with white settlers inheriting indigeneity and the land.”
“Settler self-indigenizing is not limited to Appalachia, * Under the guise of "regional studies," descendants of Appalachian and other early settlers who migrated west and settled in Missour, Oklahoma, and Texas, many of whom trekked on to the valleys of California and the Pacific Northwest, also carry with them the sense of being of the original people and often express an affinity for their version of Indianness, being men who claim "to know Indians." Another site is the intermountain west where white cattle barons dominate, many of them Mormon, who have their own indigenous origin story blessed by their God.”
-> Arrivants vs. Settlers
“In 1607, the English settlers had invaded what they called Jamestown, bringing with them Irish, Welsh, and Scots individuals who were indentured under contracts for various lengths of time. Their conditions of labor were exploitative and often cruel, but ultimately they were free to be social equals with the other English settlers. European indentured servants did not arrive as settlers, but they became settlers.”
“By 186o, there were a half million free Black people in the United States. In the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln also entertained a scheme to get rid of emancipated Black people." Johnson writes, "The history of the nineteenth-century United States was marked by repeated efforts to expatriate free blacks, to identity the space of US national sovereignty with the process of white racial purification, and to harness the property (in the form of the value of enslaved people) to the purpose of white supremacy."
-> Continental imperialism/ America as coloniser
“In 1803, the Jefferson administration, without consulting any affected Indigenous nation, purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte. The 828,000 square miles doubled the size of the United States. The territory encompassed all or part of multiple Indigenous nations, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arap-aho, Crow, Pawnee, Ponca, Osage, Arikara, and Comanche, among other peoples of the bison. It also included the area that would soon be designated Indian Territory (Oklahoma), the site of forced relocation of Indigenous peoples from east of the Mississippi in the 1840S. Fifteen states would be carved out of the Louisiana Territory during the following decades—all of present-day Arkansas, Mis-souri, lowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska; Minnesota west of the Mississippi; most of North and South Dakota; northeastern New México and north Texas; the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide; and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the city of New Orleans.”
“Members of the provincial Hispano elite were not only silent partners to foreign land ventures; they too prospered with the opening of the Santa Fé trade and acquired increased landholdings. Already controlling vast amounts of land that Spain had appropriated from the Indigenous Pueblos and disbursed through land grants, the leading families of New México continued to prosper from cartle and sheep operations, with the added element of money exchange, which allowed them to accumulate capital for trading ventures.”
“Between 1840 and the 1920s, the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement in the United States, along with vigilantes and white citizen mobs, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican Americans and killed thousands more in Texas and in the former Mexican lands that became the states of New México, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.”
“In a true reign of terror, US occupation and settlement saw the extermination of more than one hundred thousand California Native people in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by 1870. Described by scholars as the most extreme demographic disaster of all time, it has also been defined as genocide in terms of the Genocide Convention. " From the onset of the California gold rush, crazed "gold bugs" invaded Indigenous territo-ries, terrorizing and brutally killing those who were in their path.
The settlers ran roughshod over unarmed indigenous residents of fishing communities in a bountiful paradise of woods, rivers, and mountains, as well as former Mexican citizens who were farmers or ranchers. The role left for the US Army was to round up the strewing Indigenous refugees to transport them to already established resee vations in Oregon and Oklahoma.”
“Laura Gómez uses the term "double colonization," explaining that with the US annexation of half of México, in New México the various groups were obligated to deal with various "ra-cial regimes" at the same time—the Hispano, Pueblos, and other Indigenous groups within the Anglo-American racial order and the influx of Anglo settlers. Double colonization refers to Hispanos being descendants of the Spanish colonizers who appropriated most of the Pueblos territory, then themselves were colonized by the United States, thereby losing much of their landholdings, while Pueblos experienced a new solonize on top of the old Hispano one.”
-> Irish American Identity and Racial Hierarchy
“By the time of the famine that began in 1845, impoverished and colonized Ireland had already been bleeding its population through emigration, mostly to the United States. By the 183os, Irish Catholics outnumbered Scots Irish Protestants in the United States. By 1840, Irish Catholic immigrants constituted a third of the immigrant population, which increased to half the immigrant population with the arrival of the famine refugees after 1845.”
“Despite their lowly state, the Irish refugees, because the majority were light-skinned in a US culture obsessed with white-ness, became US Americans inheriting the privileges of white settler.
The stigma of Catholicism was resolved through settler-colonial extreme patriotism, which they came to embrace?* A major factor in Irish acceptance of US patriotism was Irish republicanism, as they saw the United States as a prior colony of Britain that revolted and became a republic, not recognizing the settler colonialism in the Us that was patterned after the English settler colonialism in Ireland.”
-> Asian Americans and Yellow Peril
“The first Chinese gold seekers numbered around three hun-dred, arriving in Northern California in 1849, then more than four hundred joined them. The numbers increased every year, so that in 1852, there were some twenty thousand Chinese in the gold fields.
With the construction of the first continental railroad, beginning in 1865, Chinese workers were recruited, and in 1870, there were sixty-three thousand Chinese in the US-three-fourths in California and others in parts of the country along the railroad routes as well as in northeastern cities. By 1870, Chinese immigrants made up nearly a third of the total population of Idaho, to percent in Mon-tana, and 9 percent in California, where they comprised a quarte of the entire workforce.”
“That law was the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, which suspended Chinese immigration for a ten-year period and barred resident Chinese from US citizenship, and in 1902, was renewed indefinitely. The laws were widely evaded. Exclusion was repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943, which allowed ros Chinese individuals to enter per year.”
“Historian Mae Ngai explains that the animosity of white people toward Filipinos was distinct from the ongoing Asian exclusion, first, because Orientalist characterizations didn't easily fit. Filipinos were Christians and spoke American English, wore Western clothes, and were fluent in US popular culture.”
“Three days after the Pearl Harbor attack, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover reported that 1,29 Japanese—367 in the Hawaii colomy, 924 in the United States—had been detained, along with 857 Ger mans and 147 Italians. Hoover, no flaming liberal, opined that mass internment of Japanese could not be justified on the basis of secu-rity." The Germans and Italians who were detained had been under surveillance for some time and clearly had ties with the Nazi and Fascist regimes, but the nearly thirteen hundred detained Japanese Americans had no such complicity.”
“And, as in all US wars, the Christian missionaries poured in to exploit the trauma and destitution of the targeted population.
US Americans have attempted to atone for the wreckage caused by their government and rushed to adopt orphans, adopting more than four thousand Korean children between 1955 and 1961. Some were
"GI babies" with US military fathers. Twenty-nine percent of South Koreans were Christians, so Christian missions played a large role in facilitating the adoptions."
“In 1964, when the US military mobilized for war in Vietnam. only 603 Vietnamese people lived in the United States, and they were students, teachers, and diplomats. By the turn of the rwenty-first century, there were some two million US citizens of Vietnamese descent, 40 percent living in California, nearly all of them among or descended from the half million war refugees.”
“Laos was officially neutral during the US war in Vietnam, based on a neutraliry agreement signed in 1962 by the United States, China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and ten other countries, forbidding signees from invading Laos or establishing military bases there. But the US ran a covert war in Laos for nine years, 1964-1973, called the
"Secret War in Laos," which was secret to no one except the US pub-lic. During that time, the United States Air Force bombed nearly er ery inch of Laotian territory to annihilate the Pathet Lao, which they failed to do — the Pathet Lao took power in 1975, and Laos remains a socialist country. US planes dropped over two million tons of clus ter bombs on the country, more bombs than all the ones dropped during World War II. No country has ever been bombed so heavily and for so long.”
-> The Wall
“The 1924 immigration law also created the US Border Patrol, housed in the Department of Labor, clearly targeting those crossing the US-México border, at the time seeking to bar the entrance of Chinese. Between 1900 and 1930, some seven hundred thousand Mexican migrants entered the US legally, while many others entered without documents. Most migrants worked seasonally and returned to their villages in México, which growers encouraged. As one California grower put it, after harvest "I will kick them out."? And that is exactly what happened on a large scale beginning in 1930.
Agribusiness employers in the Southwest preferred Mexican seasonal migrant workers, because at the end of harvest, the workers were on their own, without pay or housing during the winter season.
The migrants who chose to stay would relocate to cities where charities or local governments would provide relief during the periods there was no work. This shifted the expenses from employers to the public, which caused resentment, mostly toward the workers. But the caregivers also complained about the employers.”
“Between 1981 and 1990, some one million refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala crossed the México-US border, fleeing the violence in their countries. By 1982, some two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand refugees from El Salvador—a country of only five million people-and tens of thousands of Guatemalans had fled to the US. Under the 1980 Refugee Act and international law, they had the right to asylum, but the migrants' applications were turned down, while there was no limit on those claiming asylum from socialist Cuba and Nicaragua, or the European socialist states, 10s The Reagan administration categorized the refugees as
*economic migrants," maintaining that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments had not violated their human rights. The administration only increased deportation. Of more than six thousand «lum petitions in 1981, 154 were considered and only to granted, while a thousand were deported.”
“The US Fish and Wildlife Service warned that an impermeable barrier and bright light at night will destroy many endangered species." Joseph Nevins writes, "The Border, strictusenso, is a state-sanctioned system of violence: Physical, environmental, ecanom and cultural,"
June 23, 2023
In this book, Dunbar-Ortiz challenges the conventional notion that the United States is a "nation of immigrants." Instead, she argues that this narrative is a myth that erases the history of indigenous peoples and the brutal realities of settler colonialism. The author posits that the United States was founded on the genocide of indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans, and the exploitation of labor from non-European immigrants.
Dunbar-Ortiz's work is a timely and necessary contribution to the ongoing debates about immigration and the legacy of colonialism in the United States. She shows how the "nation of immigrants" narrative perpetuates a form of cultural erasure that downplays the role of indigenous peoples in the formation of the United States. By examining the historical record, she demonstrates how the settler colonial project was designed to displace, dispossess, and destroy indigenous peoples and their cultures.
One of the strengths of Dunbar-Ortiz's work is her ability to connect the dots between seemingly disparate historical events and social phenomena. She shows how the exploitation of non-European immigrants was part of a larger pattern of settler colonialism that aimed to maintain white supremacy and control over resources. She also highlights the ways in which the U.S. government has used immigration policy as a tool of racial and ethnic exclusion, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Muslim ban.
Another important contribution of Dunbar-Ortiz's work is her emphasis on the need for reparations and decolonization. She argues that the only way to address the legacy of settler colonialism is to acknowledge the ongoing harm that has been done to indigenous peoples and to work towards restitution and healing. This includes returning land and resources to indigenous communities, honoring treaties, and centering indigenous knowledge and perspectives in all aspects of society.
Overall, "Not a Nation of Immigrants" is a powerful and thought-provoking book that challenges readers to critically examine the dominant narratives about the United States and its history. Dunbar-Ortiz's work is a valuable contribution to the fields of history, sociology, and political science, and should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of immigration and colonialism in the United States.
June 27, 2025
almost reads like a textbook (compliment)
September 5, 2025
American history is unfathomable. Truly. Unfathomable.
February 6, 2022
This is how social justice books could be: a telling of history. Clearly not exhaustive but about as comprehensive as you can get and still super current in 2022.
abandoned
September 12, 2022Oof, what a frustrating book.
I agree with and appreciate the big ideas she's advancing here--essentially, that "nation of immigrants" mythology erases the genocide and imperialism inherent in U.S. settler colonialism--but too many of the aspects she covers here are too familiar me--and likely to anyone who's already done a bit of reading on the matter--for most of those discussions to be particularly illuminating, and I can't consider it a solid one-volume introduction to the topic because neither the writing nor the reliability of her facts are as strong as they could be.
With respect to the last point, if I recognize some factual claims to be inaccurate, I can't have confidence in the factuality of claims I don't yet know about one way or the other.
Two examples:
On page xix (hardcover edition) of the Introduction, she writes that "the founders inscribed in the Constitution the requirement that citizenship could be held by white males only." Where in the Constitution is this written? Functionally, it is certainly true that no one but white men were full citizens, but her phrasing suggests it's written explicitly in the Constitution. I suspect she may be attributing to the Constitution the Naturalization Act of 1790's requirement of whiteness for citizenship, at least.
Second, she later writes, "Four officers who led the war in Mexico went with the Confederacy as generals: [Lee, Braxton Bragg, Stonewall Jackson, and PGT Beauregard], while seven stayed with the United States Army: James Longstreet, Ulysses S. Grant....." Really? Longstreet? Longstreet was a major Confederate general, even if he was anomalously and significantly a Republican in the Reconstruction period and thereafter.
I feel like there were at least a couple others that I didn't make careful note of, but you can perhaps imagine how these undermine my confidence. Between this kind of thing and the general lack of either conceptual novelty or a compelling deployment of familiar concepts toward a tightly coherent argument, there's no incentive to prioritize finishing this over moving on to other books.
All that said, though, I do have to give her credit for the discussion of "Settler claims to indigeneity in Appalachia" in the middle of Chapter 2. She rebuts pretty persuasively Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow, a book I previously found pretty persuasive, and similar Appalachia Studies. These 8 pages might alone make it worth my hanging on to our copy. They don't, however, stop the rest of the book from being weaker than it should be.
I agree with and appreciate the big ideas she's advancing here--essentially, that "nation of immigrants" mythology erases the genocide and imperialism inherent in U.S. settler colonialism--but too many of the aspects she covers here are too familiar me--and likely to anyone who's already done a bit of reading on the matter--for most of those discussions to be particularly illuminating, and I can't consider it a solid one-volume introduction to the topic because neither the writing nor the reliability of her facts are as strong as they could be.
With respect to the last point, if I recognize some factual claims to be inaccurate, I can't have confidence in the factuality of claims I don't yet know about one way or the other.
Two examples:
On page xix (hardcover edition) of the Introduction, she writes that "the founders inscribed in the Constitution the requirement that citizenship could be held by white males only." Where in the Constitution is this written? Functionally, it is certainly true that no one but white men were full citizens, but her phrasing suggests it's written explicitly in the Constitution. I suspect she may be attributing to the Constitution the Naturalization Act of 1790's requirement of whiteness for citizenship, at least.
Second, she later writes, "Four officers who led the war in Mexico went with the Confederacy as generals: [Lee, Braxton Bragg, Stonewall Jackson, and PGT Beauregard], while seven stayed with the United States Army: James Longstreet, Ulysses S. Grant....." Really? Longstreet? Longstreet was a major Confederate general, even if he was anomalously and significantly a Republican in the Reconstruction period and thereafter.
I feel like there were at least a couple others that I didn't make careful note of, but you can perhaps imagine how these undermine my confidence. Between this kind of thing and the general lack of either conceptual novelty or a compelling deployment of familiar concepts toward a tightly coherent argument, there's no incentive to prioritize finishing this over moving on to other books.
All that said, though, I do have to give her credit for the discussion of "Settler claims to indigeneity in Appalachia" in the middle of Chapter 2. She rebuts pretty persuasively Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow, a book I previously found pretty persuasive, and similar Appalachia Studies. These 8 pages might alone make it worth my hanging on to our copy. They don't, however, stop the rest of the book from being weaker than it should be.
January 10, 2022
A solid but VERY academic read. The final two chapters felt disconnected from the rest of the project— making a slightly different point than the rest of the work.
Some elements began to feel repetitive while others were long lists of historical moments strung together (without much supporting context— assuming the reader has plenty of background knowledge).
Some elements began to feel repetitive while others were long lists of historical moments strung together (without much supporting context— assuming the reader has plenty of background knowledge).
February 14, 2022
Interesting topic but flow is a little obstructed. Maybe better as a sit-down-to-read book. Content is a little repetitive with what's out there commonly discussed in American studies and indigenous studies too. Could be informative for readers with little prior knowledge of the colonial and imperial nature of the US.
May 15, 2025
I thought it had taken me longer to finish but seeing that it’s only been a month makes me feel better. Reactions: wow! We always get sold and honestly, buy into this “land of immigrants” story that’s bullsh*t. Dunbar-Ortiz did a wonderful job debunking that myth. It’s a nation of settler colonialism. Always has been! The immigrant crises of the 21st century are direct results of American intervention, wars, and aggression. The chickens came home to roost. it’s well-researched, lots of evidence, and enjoyable. Very sad but real and relevant. It made me think about my experience differently. Whether we like it or not we’re all part of this settler colonialism story. Lastly, I love her point of scholars and historians “having to love America” in order to criticize her. It’s true. Why should we? Examples of Kaepernick and Baldwin. But also… free speech has always been limited and there’s only so much you can say. (Rosenberg case of 1950s). Anyway, good ass read. 10/10.
June 25, 2025
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Not a Nation of Immigrants offers a powerful and necessary deconstruction of the mythologized narrative of the United States as a land built solely by immigrants, exposing instead the foundational role of settler colonialism and white supremacy in shaping the nation’s history, identity, and structures of power. Through incisive historical analysis, Dunbar-Ortiz reveals how Indigenous erasure, racial exclusion, and the glorification of European conquest are not accidental but deliberate mechanisms of domination—central to the formation of the U.S. state. She compels us, especially Raza, oppressed peoples, and conscious white allies, to move beyond surface-level resistance and confront the root systems of colonial violence, in order to imagine and build a world free from its grip. This book is not only a critique but a call to action—an urgent reminder that dismantling white supremacy requires dismantling the settler state itself.
October 21, 2021
This is the kind of book I wish more people read.It is a retelling of the American Experience via the eyes of people who have felt, been touched , and scarred by the development of this country.Whereas we as Americans have romanticized the westward growth this country it is very easy to not see the Erasure of the previous inhabitants. Amerindians. Slaves. The development and continuation of white supremacist. The variations of colour. Irish.....It is a piercing book that throttles your intellectual neck. So many casualties. And I haven't even mentioned the Chinese,,Vietnamese . Africa...MIddle East. Central/South America.. Sometimes the presentation is thick with details to the point you need to take a mind break for an hour or so. Everything is turned upside down .Clarity comes into focus.You begin to look a things a little different . Read it if you dare.
June 15, 2025
I am TERRIBLE at reading non-fiction so I’m pretty psyched to finally finish this. It’s well-researched and highly informative, and thoroughly pushes back on the often well-meaning “nation of immigrants” idea. We’re a settler colonial state thoroughly founded on white supremacy and have constantly used global suffering and insular mythology to justify everything. There’s so much about American history and capitalist hegemony that rests on this idea of “the way it always has been and the only way it can be,” and that idea is both incredibly strong yet incredibly fragile. The understanding gained from engaging with history in books like this help expose that fragility and the fundamental absurdity of America’s current violence against immigrants.
November 18, 2024
Overall, I think this does a fantastic job of breaking down and explaining American Imperialism, however it is one of those history books that makes you want to read more about specific topics because they are more intricate than the book details. It’s not lacking in details per se; but if you’re not super familiar with history of Central and South America there’s a lot to learn.
I would also recommend taking notes because this is just incredibly dense with information. I will definitely revisit this in the future.
I would also recommend taking notes because this is just incredibly dense with information. I will definitely revisit this in the future.
September 23, 2024
This is the second book by Dunbar-Ortiz that I've read. I would recommend her "Indigenous People's History" instead. This feels like a follow up with an emphasis on current events, so it's different enough, but I might recommend other books on recent history before this one if you are only looking for a survey of race issues in US current events and want a variety of voices/perspectives.
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