Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Criticizing US scholars for their erasure of the Indian, Mahmood Mamdani writes: Engaging with the native question would require questioning the ethics and the politics of the very constitution of the United States of America. It would require rethinking and reconsidering the very political project called the U.S.A. Indeed, it would call into question the self-proclaimed anticolonial identity of the U.S. Highlighting the colonial nature of the American political project would require a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of America, one necessary to think through both America’s place in the world and the task of political reform for future generations.72 Furthermore, Mamdani argues, regarding the conflation of immigration and settlement: immigrants join existing polities whereas settlers create new ones. “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.” The nation of immigrants rhetoric that avoids the dynamics of settler colonialism plays a role that “is essential to settler-colonial nation-state projects such as the United States and Israel. The political project of the settler—to create and fortify the colonial nation-state—becomes obscured by the nonpolitical project of the immigrant, who merely seeks to take advantage of what the state allows every citizen.”73 Historian Lorenzo Veracini also...