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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

In the lead-up to the formation of the United States, Protestantism in the form of Puritanism refined already-existing European white supremacy as part of a political-religious ideology in defense of settler-colonial genocide of Indigenous inhabitants and the codification of Blackness as slave status. Irish famine immigrants, then, arrived in the United States as inferiorized and stigmatized people. This was the time of the violent ethnic cleansing of the Southeast Indigenous commons in the 1840s and appropriation of land and human property by slavers. The result was the Cotton Kingdom, a vast commercial-agricultural construct made up of factory-like plantations surrounded by concentration camp conditions to control enslaved Black workers, elevating the US economy to the wealthiest among European states. This was the birth of fully developed racial capitalism, the fiscal-military state. Despite their lowly state, the Irish refugees, because the majority were light-skinned in a US culture obsessed with whiteness, 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.28 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....