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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Union workers in most countries are considered a progressive if not left-wing force. But the US working class is different. Mike Davis offers three main reasons. First, by the mid-nineteenth century, workers’ geographic mobility in the United States substituted for collective action; that is, if working conditions or poor pay created intolerable conditions, the worker could move on. British settler colonialism was based on attracting settlers to gain free land, property; so, as Friedrich Engels observed, US culture was the “purest bourgeois culture.”58 Second, Davis cites the cultural division of the US working class, writing that the most disastrous obstacle to labor unity in the 1850s was the reaction of native workers to the arrival of several million impoverished Irish migrants. They provided cheap labor for the growth of New England factories as well as armies of raw muscle for western railroads and the Pennsylvania coalfields. They were met by universal nativist hostility and riots against them, evicted from workplaces, refused admission into trade unions, and excluded from voting. Protestantism in the United States was not simply a majority religion but a constituent militant element of US nationalism.59 The millions of Irish Catholic famine refugees arrived in the aftermath of the half century of Protestant fervor after the second “Great Awakening,” the first having swept through the British colonies in the 1730s and linked the separate settler colonies by fanatic ...