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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The North American slavers took care to maintain a majority European population and mandated intense policing that involved all European colonists, whether or not they owned enslaved Africans. Only the South Carolina colony came close to an enslaved African majority at US independence.

Historian Fara Dabhoiwala points out that even at the time, John Locke concluded that, in fact, “slavery itself was always a state of war” and no slave defeat was ever final.

With the beginning boom of cotton in the Mississippi Valley, the old slave colonies of Virginia and South Carolina—their soil depleted from monocrop commercial agriculture—operated a thriving and profitable slave reproduction industry that created a lucrative domestic market. It was a form of industrial production that predated twentieth-century cattle and hog factory farms; however, it was the forced breeding of human beings.

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 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.

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 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 were essentially settlers.

One factor that led to the US pulling troops out of the South prematurely was the dozens of wars the United States was initiating against Indigenous nations in the Northern Plains, Southwest, and West, led by former Union Army officers—in addition to Canby, William Tecumseh Sherman, Phillip H. Sheridan, George Crook, Nelson Miles, George Armstrong Custer, and others. Undoubtedly, engrained white supremacy among the white army officers contributed to their poor performance as enforcers of desegregation.

In fact, the United States never broke with the slaveocracy, as exemplified in the career of Forrest. He lost his parents and economic security at seventeen, but became a slave trader, land speculator, and finally a wealthy slaver with his own large plantation. He was the epitome of the “self-made” man that was the vaunted ideal of white settler mythology. In the Civil War, Forrest was a Confederate cavalry officer and was infamous for having led the massacre of hundreds of disarmed Black Union soldiers in 1864, a war crime even at that time. Yet President Andrew Johnson granted Forrest a presidential pardon in 1868 while he was a hero of the Klan.

Now and then, a Klansman would be put on trial by the occupying US Army, but no one would ever be convicted for Klan violence, even murder. Occasionally, the US Army would declare martial law, but as one army commander said in 1871, “The entire United States Army would be insufficient to give protection throughout the South to everyone in possible danger from the Klan.”44 The Klan was effectively the reconstituted Confederate Army.

During that time, the state built twenty-three major new prisons, whereas between 1852 and 1964, there were only twelve state prisons. In addition to the prisons, the state ran five less restrictive prison camps and thirteen community corrections facilities, each with five hundred beds. The cost to the state’s general fund went from 2 percent in 1982 to 8 percent in the early 2000s. The California Department of Corrections became the largest state agency, with 54,000 employed.

Law enforcement boomed in the 1980s and ‘90s, consuming up to half of cities’ budgets. Police unions functioned as parallel agencies without any public scrutiny, successfully defending any of their members from punishment for murder or other abuse. Programs of reform, retraining, antibias training, and ethnic and racial diversification failed to change a police culture of anti-Black bias in the United States.

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 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.

The US government does not welcome Haitian immigrants, who have one of the highest deportations rates. The United States Marines invaded Haiti in 1915 and militarily occupied the country to 1934, nearly two decades. Two generations of Haitians grew up under US military occupation, which was oppressive and often violent. The majority of Haitians are desperately poor, and a large percentage are homeless in their own country following the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed nearly a quarter of a million people. For eight years, from 1916 to 1924, during the same period of the occupation of Haiti, the border country of the Dominican Republic was also occupied by the US military. In both countries, chaos, instability, and impoverishment resulted in emigration, much of it undocumented, to the United States. Historian Ryan Fontanilla, who also served in the US Coast Guard, had the unsavory task of participating in the rough and often violent pursuits of Haitian asylum seekers crowded in rickety boats attempting to reach US territory. He writes that the legal structure of Coast Guard techniques is rooted in the transatlantic slave trade. “A disquieting intuition repeated in my head: the USCG cutter, the Haitians’ sailing vessel, and European slave ships represented a triad of homologous instances in which people of African descent have suffered involuntary concentration in small spaces upon the Atlantic. I dreaded that I was in closer proximity to the enslavers of the past, an...

In 2012, there were 930,000 newly registered asylum seekers driven out from their countries. Three years later, there were 2.3 million.”

The United States ranks nineteenth in the number of immigrants per capita it takes in annually.69 The wealthiest country in the world and the one most responsible for wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is unwilling to allow the refugees they generate to move to the United States.

México outlawed slavery in 1830 and banned further immigration to Texas. The Anglo slavers ignored both laws.

In 1823, Austin employed ten men initially to kill the Indigenous residents who did not comply with being pushed out of their homelands. This marked the birth of the Texas Rangers. They grew as a force, and when Texas claimed independence in 1835, they were constituted as the state militia with military titles.

The US Army in México had the highest desertion rate of any army in US history—8 percent.

Between 1840 and the 1920s, the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement in the United States, along with vigilantes and white citizen mobs, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican Americans and killed thousands more in Texas and in the former Mexican lands that became the states of New México, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.

The war against México was a training ground and a rehearsal for the Civil War twelve years later.

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.

As the population began to grow, surveillance increased.45 This border openness tightened with the Mexican Revolution of 1910–17, which was largely due to US fear of a radical revolution spilling over the border during a period of intense socialist labor organizing the United States.

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. The settlers ran roughshod over unarmed Indigenous residents of fishing communities in a bountiful paradise of woods, rivers, and mountains, as well as former Mexican citizens who were farmers or ranchers. 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.

In a parallel development, the Pueblos continued their vigorous battles for land and water rights, which often conflicted with Hispano land claims. Land tenure, along with water rights, without exception remain the major political and social issues of northern New México. Federal land comprises 30 percent of the state, or 25.7 million acres, most of it the result of the settlement of Hispano land grants. These forested areas, lava beds, and mountains are all areas that Pueblos traditionally considered sacred and contain particular sites of ritual; they are analogous to what Christians call churches and cathedrals and pilgrimages. 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. Meanwhile, without much attention paid by the Alianza, Pueblos in New México were continuing their ceaseless claims to land and water, with Taos Pueblo winning a major victory in 1970, thanks to decades of pressure bolstered by the Native rights movement and the more militant Red Power movement. 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 t...

This kind of extreme exemplary violence, a common practice of all European colonizers, was meant to give warning to others of the high cost of resistance.

Racializing indigeneity to be about blood quantum is another way of eliminating Indigenous nations whose indigeneity is not based in genetics but in their citizenship in a Native nation based on ancestry, not race. Scholar Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing, although useful in identifying close biological relatives, is problematic. Tribal citizenship is a legal category. TallBear notes that the “markers” that are identified and applied to Native nations reflect the misinterpretations of the researcher.

Therefore, during the 1980s and ‘90s, the origin story of self-identified Chicanos in New México was transformed from being embedded in the 1680 Pueblo revolution against the Spanish to celebrating the 1598 Spanish invasion and colonization of the Pueblos as the birth marker of the Chicano.

Echoing The Last of the Mohicans, the great gift-giving Indian is a refrain of settler colonialism in the United States.

During the fall of 1974, court-ordered school desegregation in Boston began with white rioting, and the predominately Irish American working-class neighborhood of South Boston vied with Selma, Alabama, of 1964, assuming the mantle of virulent anti-Black racism.

The situation continued for three years. The length of time and violence incurred by Boston antibusing was far greater than had occurred in any other US city.

How could it be that descendants of long-suffering and impoverished Irish Catholics fleeing Protestant England-colonized Ireland, being starved out, did not see a reflection of their own historical existential misery as analogous to the descendants of enslaved Africans?

The twelfth-century Christian Crusades against Muslims and their expulsion from Spain in the early fifteenth century and the Anglo Norman twelfth-century invasion and occupation of Ireland mark the beginnings of European colonialism. Spain became a world imperialist power by invading and occupying most of the Western Hemisphere. England invaded and began the colonization of Ireland in 1155, which was not completed until 1801.

In the 1830s, Frenchman Gustave de Beaumont visited Ireland and published an ominous account of what he witnessed: Misery, naked and famishing, that misery which is vagrant, idle, and mendicant, covers the entire country; it shows itself everywhere, and at every hour of the day; it is the first thing you see when you land on the Irish coast, and from that moment it ceases not to be present to your view; sometimes under the aspect of the diseased displaying his sores, sometimes under form of the pauper scarcely covered by his rags; it follows you everywhere, and besieges you incessantly; you hear its groans and cries in the distance, and if the voice does not excite profound pity, it importunes and terrifies you.

English rulers’ response to the potato famine and the plight of the Irish was inaction. Food was available, but the English colonial masters claimed that food assistance would create Irish dependency, whereas in reality they considered the Irish a surplus population. The potato famine was a form of colonial genocide.

They did not starve as they would have at home, but there is much evidence that they did not regard themselves as willing immigrants or the US as the American Dream but saw themselves as exiles, having been forced out of their homeland. They blamed the English government and the landlord system; as one woman from Limerick put it, “Due to the suppression of the English, the Irish were practically driven from their homes.” Another said, “We didn’t want to leave Ireland, but we had to.”

Although neither the Irish nor the later European immigrants left their homes and countries and arrived in the United States in pursuit of the American Dream, a concept invented in 1931, they surely were not aware of, or were in denial about, the racial capitalist order they were entering.

Although the Know-Nothing Party faded as a party, the ideological tendency continued in US politics, becoming dominant in the mid-twentieth century in opposition to the civil rights movement and immigration, including among white Catholics when they were no longer the target.

In the first surge of Irish American police in the second half of the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants went from being viewed as the major source of crime to becoming the police who fought it.

In 1855, of the 1,100 police in the New York Police Department, three hundred were born in Ireland, seven hundred were second-generation Irish Americans, and thirty-six had served prison terms.

He then narrates a “tradition extant that some tribes of those Indians are of Irish descent,” asserting that, in 1169, the son of a Welsh prince and an Irish princess gathered a number of ships and crew and set out west to “discover lands then unknown,” therefore “discovering America” before Columbus. Patrick Higgins observes that the United States came to form a “blind spot” for Irish nationalists, even among those with a stated record of opposing British colonialism around the world. An example of this is Roger Casement, who wrote at length against Belgium’s actions in the Congo and the British Empire’s crimes in Africa and Asia, yet regarded the United States positively.73

Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century were transported to America in “coffin ships.” Some arrived in such a state that port officials had to check whether they were alive or dead as they sorted out the bodies. But, once ashore, they were accorded a status denied to African Americans. The Irish were never slaves. To posit a parallel between the experiences of Irish Americans and African Americans is to reveal either awesome ignorance or outright racism. The incorporation of the Irish into the American State helps explain the over-representation of the Irish in the repressive institutions of the US today.

Hogan even sees a distortion of Irish history that damages the actual history of oppression. “There is no need to exaggerate what our ancestors endured. . . . This refusal to differentiate between indentured servitude and racialized perpetual hereditary chattel slavery via the transatlantic slave trade, only feeds white supremacist myths.”84 This myth is a pernicious one that is used to create a false equivalency to support anti-Black racist claims that white people experienced slavery too and emerged from it successfully and without complaint, while descendants of enslaved Africans claim damage and liability and demand reparations.

And, of course, Columbus was not even his name. David Vine asks, “Why do we call the man who some celebrate today as ‘Christopher Columbus’ when that wasn’t his name?” pointing out that his only known name historically is Spanish—Cristóbal Colón—not difficult to pronounce, but definitely not an English name. Because Colón was being repurposed to be the founder of the United States, his name was anglicized to Christopher Columbus.

As Trouillot observes, to make Columbus the discoverer of the United States, it was necessary to whiten him. Anglo-American was the definition of whiteness, and clearly Columbus was not Anglo, was not American, and did not speak English. While Columbus was becoming whiter, racism against Italian Americans was at its height in the United States.

In 1912, the US House Committee on Immigration debated whether Italians could be considered “full-blooded Caucasians,” and immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe were considered “biologically and culturally less intelligent.”

Employers often preferred light-skinned Slovaks and Poles to Italians. Railroad bosses wouldn’t hire them because of their small stature. In the mining industry, English-speaking workers held the skilled and supervisory positions while Italians were hired as laborers. Even those who were educated and skilled were unable to secure any jobs besides manual labor. Only in the 1920s did Italians become more integrated into the workforce.

Except for the Jewish immigrants who had fled Jew-hating, violent pogroms in Russia and Poland, many of the immigrants had hopes of returning home. None had the mythical American Dream in mind. In 1908, more Austro-Hungarians and Italians left the US than arrived.

During the three decades after 1880, more than two million mostly Ashkenazi Yiddish-speaking Jewish people fled Tsarist Russia and Eastern Europe, escaping vicious pogroms.38 Most settled in industrial areas of the Northeast.

The main reason that capitalist giants like Henry Ford maligned Jews had less to do with banking than with the fact of their labor militancy. This was the time of the rise of the US Socialist Party and militant trade unionism, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution.

And it is certain that “liberty” was laughable to the captive Geronimo and his people, who at the time were being shipped in chains to a dungeon prison at Fort Marion, Florida, or to those Indigenous nations that had been incarcerated in reservations carved out of their former homelands, learning that Congress was set to divide the reservation lands into marketable allotments, which would end up privatizing three-fourths of the already shrunken Native land base. Or for that matter, those teeming masses of Lazarus’s poem, huddled in the overcrowded slums of the Lower East Side in New York City, who were doubtfully even aware of the festivities celebrating liberty.

Roosevelt-appointed Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld compulsory sexual sterilization laws, which gave the state of Virginia, thereby all states, the power to regulate the breeding of its citizens.58 A few years after the Supreme Court decision, the Nazi regime that took power in Germany in 1933 adopted US race law and eugenics as a fundamental platform for their governance, as well as embracing US continental imperialism and ethnic cleansing as the basis for their program of Lebensraum, which led to death camps for Jews, Roma, communists, and the disabled.