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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Historian Livia Gershon observes that “to a large extent, northern US cities invented their police departments as a way to control the ‘Irish problem.’“ Irish immigrants populated shantytowns and slums of cities, and many, for lack of employment or income, turned to petty theft and sex work. Drunkenness, domestic abuse, and gangs were the fruit of impoverishment. There were many poor Irish Americans in the cities even before the influx of millions of famine refugees. In 1837 in Boston, there was a Protestant-led, anti-Irish Catholic riot of fifteen thousand people, which was about a fifth of Boston’s population, that destroyed the Irish neighborhood. Only the Irish Americans were prosecuted while the assailants went free. The next year the Boston Police Department, the first in the country, was established to control the “dangerous classes.” Unsurprisingly, nativist panic flourished with the arrival of masses of Irish refugees in the 1840s and ‘50s. One Boston Irishman was hired by the police force in 1851, but was ousted after three years when the nativist and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party took control of the Massachusetts legislature. Hiring predominately Irish Americans for the police force was a result of Irish political power through the Democratic Party in cities over the next decades.49 Organized police departments were established in New York City in 1845; Albany, New York, and Chicago in 1851; New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853; Philadelphia in 1855; and Newark...