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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Although President Truman signed the convention, it went into effect in the United States only in 1988 when the US Congress finally ratified it, the only member state of the United Nations that had not done so. The convention is not retroactive, so the United States is not liable under the Genocide Convention before 1988. The Truman administration had lobbied in favor of it at the United Nations, and President Truman signed the Convention and sent it to the Senate for ratification. There, the all-white Senate expressed concern that genocide charges might result from the history of racial segregation, lynching, and Ku Klux Klan activities. In addition, although the treaty was not retroactive, senators expressed fear that it would be used to define the nineteenth-century US treatment of Native Americans as genocide.