Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
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The Haitian Revolution that began in 1791 as a massive slave insurrection achieved Haitian independence from France in 1804, the first successful national liberation movement against European colonialism.
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gaining legality through treaties. “Enslaved men, women, and children fought not only to win freedom, or territory, or simply a space to live their own lives, but to uphold their human dignity: to fight was to raise hope, to create possibilities, to refuse to be subjected. And it always inspired others.
Jack
Relevant for H. Education.
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The Haitian Revolution and other insurrections in the Caribbean convinced North American slavers to breed slaves rather than relying on importation of Africans. Consequently, both the British and the new United States outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807.
Jack
As opposed to seeing it as a sign of morality.
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Between 1840 and 1860, the cotton and slave economy made up half of the total goods exported from the United States and formed the basis of institutions that are fundamental in the present: policing and the prison system and the real estate, insurance, and finance systems.20
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That said, in the US South when the Lehmans arrived, when the numbers of enslaved people were at their apex, there were only one hundred twenty Jews among the forty-five thousand slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves, and only twenty Jews among the twelve thousand slaveholders owning fifty or more slaves.22 The conspiracy pseudo-theory of Jewish domination of the African slave trade and Jews as a major slaver element in the Americas, such as the 1991 Nation of Islam two-volume publication “The Secret Relationship of Jews and Blacks,” is
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part of the larger anti-Jewish mythology of economic control. In Western Europe and Britain, Catholics and Protestants were the drivers of the transatlantic slave trade and made up the overwhelming majority of slavers. Some Jews were slavers and some were involved in the slave trade, but most who were involved in the slave economy, which was the basis of the US economy, were, like the Lehmans, merchant suppliers of goods.
Jack
N.B.
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Slavery and the slave trade constituted the basis of US capitalist development and articulates racial capitalism today.
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By the 1820s, there were 230,000 free Black people in the United States. Thomas Jefferson originated the idea of how to get rid of them and came up with the destination: Africa. Jefferson, with other like-thinking slavers, created the American Colonization Society as a private company in 1817, which established the colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa
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in 1822, becoming an independent state in 1847. The indigenous people who lived there were not consulted. The Black Americans spoke only English, and they
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US proponents of Black colonization were not related to slavery per se, but rather to their problem with the presence of free Black people.
Jack
What to do with the FREE Blacks.
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in possible danger from the Klan.”44 The Klan was effectively the reconstituted Confederate Army.
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By the turn of the twenty-first century, a carceral landscape spread across the continent, with federal, state, and local prisons in deindustrialized sites as well as chronically impoverished rural areas functioning as a jobs program. One out of every one hundred people in the US was behind bars, the total number over 2.3 million—172,000 in 102 federal prisons, 1,200,000 in 1,700 state
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prisons, and 680,000 in 3,200 local jails, plus 942 juvenile facilities and 79 Native American jails, plus immigration detention centers and military prisons. Some 150,000 more inmates were in privately owned and operated prisons. African American male inmates made up 37 percent of the male prison population, while Black males make up 6 percent of the US population.
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Only Native Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate than African Americans, 38 percent higher than the national average.49
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Police in the United States kill civilians at a far higher rate than any other wealthy country: per ten million people, US police kill 35.5 individuals while Canadian police, which
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have a negative reputation for violence and targeting among Native people, kill 9.8 individuals per ten million. Australian police kill 8.5 per ten million; the Netherlands, 2.3; New Zealand, 2.0; Germany, 2.3; the United Kingdom, 0.5; Japan, 0.2; Iceland and Norway, zero.53
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By 2011, Homeland Security had spent $34 billion in domestic military grants to police forces, going to all-sized cities.56 Balko traces the militarization and increased violence of the police back to the postwar civil rights and anti-war organizing and demonstrations, particularly the Nixon administration’s war on drugs, which led to a gradual increase in the size, scope, and culture of the police.
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Massive miklitarization of pooice forfces - excess materiel from Iraq a d Afghanistan
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Between 2015 and 2020, forty-eight Black
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women were killed by police and only two police officers were charged.57
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Danticat writes: Some black immigrant parents harbor the illusion that if their émigré and U.S.-born children are the most polite, the best dressed, and the hardest working in school, they might somehow escape the brunt of systemic racism. But the myth of the good immigrant as exempt from police assault and murder kept getting shattered around us.
Jack
Amdou Diallo and others.
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However, in the United States the process of Americanization of immigrants is one of erasing history with the presentation of a canned narrative of greatness and goodness and expectation of immigrant gratitude for being a part of it, threatening the immigrant’s legitimacy in the absence of birthright citizenship. There is a similar expectation that, somehow, Black Americans should be grateful for Lincoln and the Civil War that brought emancipation from slavery, ignoring the tradition of enslaved African resistance and free Black abolitionism. Police killings of Black people, particularly young ...more
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People conquered
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by war and dominated by an imperialist power are not immigrants.
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Jefferson Davis, a colonel in the war against México, returned to serve as Secretary of War, from 1853 to 1857, in the Franklin Pierce administration before he became president of the Confederate States of America in 1860.
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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.49 From the onset of the California gold rush, crazed “gold bugs” invaded Indigenous territories, terrorizing and brutally killing those who were in their path.
Jack
California Gold Rush >horrible treatment
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The role left for the US Army was to round up the starving Indigenous refugees to transport them to already established reservations in Oregon and Oklahoma.
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Land tenure, along with water rights, without exception remain the major political and social issues of northern New México. Federal
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Indigenous groups in the 60`s evoke tghe Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo to secure (reclaim their land).
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The various federal agencies—Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and others police the lands and create barriers to Pueblo traditional usage.
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After more than a half century of litigation, mass struggle, and congressional debate, forty-eight thousand acres of land, including Blue Lake, were returned to Taos Pueblo, land and water sacred to the Taos people that had been appropriated by the United States Forest Service as the Carson National Forest in 1906. The victory of Taos was one of the few instances of land being returned to its Indigenous owners rather than monetary compensation being made.68
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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 colonizer on top of the old Hispano one. Gómez claims that this double colonization resulted in everyone having to compete for “status.”
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In aligning themselves with whiteness, some Hispanics advocated for
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“pure” Spanish blood to be perpetuated by pushing a eugenics movement, treating those with mixed backgrounds as “mongrels who couldn’t govern themselves.” . . . Whiteness figured very prominently into the creation of Hispanics, at least in the context of New México. If it were to truly be in allyship to Indigenous communities, I think we need to acknowledge our complicity in the roles that we’ve played historically, that our forebears have played, and understand that Latinx people are both the protagonists in historical justice and the progeny of colonization.78
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The Apache and Navajo three-hundred-year resistance to European and European American colonialism may have been the longest continuous resistance to European colonialism in the world, with Geronimo, the final leader, a global icon of resistance.
Jack
Go Geronimo!!
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