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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The late Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out that many more enslaved Africans were placed in the Caribbean sugar plantation islands and Brazil than in the thirteen English colonies. “Enslaved Africans worked and died in the Caribbean a century before the settlement at Jamestown,” and the Caribbean as a whole imported the greatest number of enslaved Africans, the second being Brazil.13 This is true, but it was also intentional on the part of British, then European American slavers who trembled in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, even banning the transatlantic slave trade, believing rightly that newly arrived enslaved Africans, such as the Angolans in Haiti, were more likely to rebel while their cultures and languages and memories of freedom were intact.