Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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

• 
  Randall Wallace

  As Mahmood Mamdani brilliantly reminds us, “If Europeans in the United states were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies of the New World. Instead, they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.” Settlers, unlike immigrants, demand they carry their sovereignty with them (Zionism, anyone?). Mamdani also said that a deracialized U.S. would still remain “a settler society and a settler state.” Roxanne’s book’s central thesis: “The nation of immigrants myth erases the fact that the United States was founded as a settler state from its inception and spent the next hundred years at war against Native Nations in conquering the continent.” US Liberals and the Right still see our Revolutionary War as anti-colonialists overthrowing British colonists. Progressives today see Revolutionary War as devotees of both settler-colonialism and racial capitalism (ex-land surveyor and slave holder GW and crew) mortally threatened by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (stop your settler-colonial land-dispossessing crimes) and the British Somerset Decision of 1772 (stop your backwoods racial capitalism crimes - a.k.a. $LAVERY). The 1763 Proclamation was opposed to continued stealing through plunder the thousand-year-old native villages in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region.
  
  In the Smithsonian locked away is a photograph taken by a US Cavalry soldier of an Indian baby lying in a field of snow shredded by a Gatling gun. We are not supposed to see this photo.” The first US immigration law was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The NRA was once a rather benign organization until taken over by the white nationalist Second Amendment Foundation, actually founded by the border chief of “Operation Wetback”. The Second Amendment at that point became a white nationalist cause. The average number of guns by US gun owners today? Eight. Picture westward expansion through native land with “settlers armed to the teeth”. A full third of the continental US was “brutally annexed through a war of conquest” in 1848. Note that: “Trump was not against European immigrants.”
  
  In the hit play “Hamilton”, Hamilton and Lafayette both laughingly proclaim after the battle of Yorktown: “Immigrants: We Get Things Done”. What rubbish. Hamilton was then (1781) a citizen of Great Britain and Lafayette was a French militarist soon to return to France. Miranda’s Hamilton is based on a hagiography written by a guy not even trained in history (Ron Chernow). In real life, Hamilton was a hard liner on the presence of foreigners. Experts on Aaron Burr thought the play depicted Burr wrongly. Burr was a man of the Enlightenment, championing press freedom, criminal justice reform, and the rights of women and immigrants. “George Washington raffled off slave children to pay his debts.” Hamilton sided with the French during the Haitian Revolution and not with the Blacks seeking freedom and liberty. This play wouldn’t dare tell you that Hamilton himself bought and sold slaves; instead, the play Hamilton is a liberal feel-good US origin fantasy which erases both slavery and the indigenous while turning racist founders (signing documents to EXCLUDE all non-whites) conveniently into men of color. No wonder, progressives didn’t buy such selling of the deeds of wealthy white men as musical entertainment, even with the buttered popcorn. Hamilton even talked about sending the US army into Spanish Florida, and then continuing on to Central and South America. What a douchebag.
  
  Our founders were neither oppressed nor colonized. Instead, call them imperialists who envisioned the taking of the entire continent as spoils. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance had provisions taken from prior British settler-colonialism in Ulster. One thing that separated our founders from the British, was that our founders were collectively able to say the rather contradictory expression “empire of liberty” without breaking out laughing.
  
  The primary motive for settler-colonialism is not race, but territory. The US was founded as a “settler-colonial, fiscal military state” promising free land to white males in order to push “recruiting and motivating settlers to squat on Indigenous people’s lands.” Much native land division was done with surveyor’s Gunter chains placed twenty-two yards apart. Daniel Boone is an icon of US settler-colonialism. Our Western Territories stayed territories so long because of clear continued native resistance to US settler-colonialism. Let’s listen to Union General Sherman explaining his US army directives: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children… during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” US state violence clearly against those who committed no crime permeates our history, if you allow yourself to see it. Did you know US military annals STILL lists the Wounded Knee Massacre as a victorious “battle”? Most of us have learned years back about the Trail of Tears under Andrew Jackson but not that the Navajo and Dakota Nations were also forced to march away from their homelands during the Civil War. Remember that it was the theoretical “good” Union side of the Civil War that actually committed the Sand Creek Massacre. Conservative Christians will love that Colonel Chivington, who led that massacre was nothing less than a Methodist pastor; no doubt their Constantinian Jesus would have loved Chivington’s wanton killing of infants for future crimes. Where did the US Army go after the Civil War? Injun hunting – six of the seven divisions went west of the Mississippi – as Zionists know, settler-colonialism can’t dispossess people without keeping up some nasty looming threat of ultimate violence. This led to the brutal murder of “tens of millions of bison” by countless white wetiko losers. Don’t forget: This Wild West violence by gun shitshow started east of the Mississippi not west of it. Don’t buy the hype: genocidal intent you can repeatedly see since the founding of the US.
  
  Roxanne refers to the “settler state of Israel”. You can’t have an effective UN when the five most powerful nations have veto power for ANY resolution (and when two nations get to clearly act as rogue states defying international law). Roxanne says the nasty Doctrine of Discovery is still a fundamental law of the Unites States. Check that out. Jefferson said Doctrine of Discovery was international law – voila! Clear theft backed up by law.
  
  Brazil has more slave-descendants (65,000,000) than the US (41,000,000). However, the Caribbean imported more enslaved Africans than even Brazil. Slave Insurrections and the Haitian Revolution taught the Slave Trade a lesson: you are probably safer these days not importing but breeding your own slaves, so their only memories will be of being captive. The majority of profits from slavery came from “increased value of slaves’ bodies.” Today’s industrial hog and cattle farm owners can look nostalgically back to the forced breeding of black bodies in direct homage. Here’s wonderful party trivia: We know Hugo Boss gained fame designing for the Nazi’s, but did you know Brooks Brothers was heavily involved in the Slave Trade? When you want to adorn your human property to impress fellow racists, who else would you call, but Brooks Brothers?
  
  Bloodhounds were weaponized dogs trained “from pups to identify and hunt black people.” “Wanted” fliers could attract bounty hunters from 100 miles away. A loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment after the Civil War allows the incarceration of blacks in the South as an effective way to place them technically back in slavery (civiliter mortus). US Troops then couldn’t both enforce Reconstruction in the South by staying there, as well as get full-on settler-colonial on the remaining natives out West. The divisions had to choose. So, they went West. Theft of the West (under Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, Custer, et al) easily won out over continuing the now conveniently forgotten “end slavery” motif of the Civil War. In 1871, an Army commander said the entire US Army couldn’t protect the entire South. The Confederate Army would informally reconstitute itself as the Ku Klux Klan.
  
  Here’s a joke: The country that has the most money and recently contributed most violence to wars around the world, is (here’s the punch line) unwilling to allow the refugees it generated to move to the US. Racial codes were invented to justify genocide. Go beyond the 1846 invasion of Mexico and look at the 1806 US spy mission into Mexico in hopes to annex it. See US imperialism as there from inception, and NOT as a period (the way it is taught). Replace the words expansion and manifest destiny with imperialism. Howard Lamar traces US colonialism to the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. Jefferson sent off Lewis & Clark as well as Zebulon Pike on two military missions out West to scout native lands and map military strength and Spanish assets. The first job of the Texas Rangers was ten white men hired to kill resident locals who didn’t voluntarily leave their homes. The Rangers were born as, and long remained, a semi-autonomous ethnic-cleansing machine. 500 Mexicans ended up being lynched by people related to the Texas Rangers. When Marines sing “The Halls of Montezuma…” they actually are glorifying the illegal US invasion of Mexico and brutal six-month occupation involving burning fields and villages and murdering and torturing civilian resisters. Hey, if you can’t sing in a crew cut about being a brutal aggressor defying international law, how else can you be patriotic?
  
  It’s important to know that the Pueblos also have a case against the Spanish for settler-colonialism: they reduced the Pueblo landbase to 5% while reducing the population by 90%. During US desegregation, the longest anti-busing battle happened not in the South, but in Boston (right wing populism).
  
  In 1155, England invades Ireland, but colonization is only completed in 1801. The plantation of Ulster is forced on Ireland and acts as the settler-colonial template for the British. The settlers were Protestant on an all-Catholic island. “Traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and families crushed with debt and hunger.” The Irish Potato Famine (1,000,000+ died) was colonial genocide. The Irish were deemed a surplus population, like the people of the Slavic regions were deemed by Hitler (for lebensraum). Irish food was exported from Ireland by Britain during the famine (Britain did this same forced genocidal famine thing to India and Iran as well). An Ulster Scot scientist wrote the settler-colonial concept out clearly: The race [Celtic] must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still, they must leave. England’s safety requires it.” The solution to Cecil Rhodes for social problems was taking by force new lands “to settle the surplus population”. Cecil said, “The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.” Engels wrote of Ireland that “the country has been completely ruined by the English wars of conquest from 1100 to 1850.”
  
  Who were the settler-colonials in Northern Ireland? The Protestant Scots-Irish. Who were the hung-ho settler-colonialists and the biggest thieves of the hunting grounds and farmlands of Natives on the US drive westward? The Protestant Scots-Irish, had lots of years of prior experience in taking other people’s land by force back in Ireland. In the US, they created a “veritable human shield of colonial civilization.” They were “good foot soldiers” of both empires. After 1840, even the Catholic Scots-Irish joined the settler-colonial bandwagon because settler-colonialism became one of the fastest tickets out of Stigmatown for Irish Catholics in the anti-Catholic United States. The Irish become “white” in the US, by openly becoming patriotic settlers. While committing acts of violence against natives you could sidetrack yourself with the thought that the US once fought England just as you as Irish once fought England. And you could get your brutality out in that kinky new American Style – by clearly violently targeting specifically those who did you no wrong. The fatal mistake of the Irish Catholic settlers was that they did not also see clearly how “settler colonialism in the US was patterned after the English settler-colonialism in Ireland.” Fredrick Douglas after visiting Ireland noted how easily the recently oppressed Irish are “instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro.” As a Quaker and half-Irish reader, learning the role of Protestant Scots-Irish in US settler-colonialism (although before my ancestors arrived) was depressing but important corrective news for me.
  
  If the 150-foot-long DC memorial to US war dead in Vietnam were adjusted to cover the length of the names of the Vietnamese dead instead (with the same font and size), it would be nine miles long. In Hitler’s sequel to Mein Kampf (I’m guessing Dein Kampf?) he accurately called the US a “race-state”. “After World War II, the US was paying 75 percent of the cost of French military operations in Vietnam.” Lieutenant Calley explained after My Lai, “I looked at communism as a southerner looks at a Negro, supposedly. It’s evil. It’s bad.” The US in Laos tried to destroy the Pathet Lao but even after dropping a whopping 2 million tons of cluster bombs, failed pathetically. Did you know that not one, but five US administrations tried to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi of Libya? Ah, the joys of being a shamelessly bipartisan rogue state.
  
  It’s past time to really look at the immigrant’s role in US settler colonialism, and Roxanne’s book is an excellent way to do that. What a perfect book for descendants of immigrants to not just understand settler-colonialism in the US past but also how the Americanization process “sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the indigenous peoples.” I rarely vote a book five stars on Goodreads because it means “amazing”, but this book exactly fills a critical niche that must be filled. Bravo.
• 
  Bookworm

  Decided to read this because of the topic. I had read a few of books by the author, had never been particularly a fan of her writing style, but decided it was worth reading what she might have to say.
  
  The premise is probably not difficult to grasp: despite the trope that the United States is one of immigrants, it is actually far more complicated and darker than that. That this was land that was stolen from Native people, and that slaves were brought from Africa to build it is a narrative that does not get discussed remembered enough. Especially when viewed from how people do not understand the historical, societal, political, etc. ramifications that are still felt through this moment.
  
  Overall, I thought this was an extremely strange book. I was put off by the author starting off with Alexander Hamilton and the well-known musical production. I understood the author was trying to make, but it felt weirdly like the author really wanted to talk about the musical instead.
  
  Like the previous books, I found the writing style really tough to get through. Dunbar-Ortiz is not an author for me, although I fully acknowledge she has very important things to say. But I'd definitely supplement this work with something else.
  
  Library borrow for me and that was best.
• 
  Josephine Ensign

  Having liked her previous book, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, I expected to like this book as well. I found its tone to be off-putting and detracting from the power of the story, as well as unfocused and even confusing in its attempt to cover every possible racial and ethnic group in the United States.
• 
  Carlos Martinez

  The hard truth: the US is a settler colony, built on the basis of slavery, theft, genocide, white supremacy and militant expansionism. Tough to swallow perhaps, but deal with it. There's no hope of developing a new culture fit for the 21st century without an extensive discussion and deep understanding of the fundamental cultural and political roots beneath the current reality. Dunbar-Ortiz's book is absolutely indispensable in that regard, along with
  A People's History of the United States,
  American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News―From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror,
  The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean and others.
• 
  Sarah Cavar

  The range of this book is truly impressive! Not only the breadth of subject matter that is covered with considerable depth, but also the theoretical rigor throughout. This is the perfect text for someone outside the strict disciplinary boundaries of critical race theory or settler colonial studies, but seeking a more comprehensive and rigorous engagement with decolonial scholarship than is available in pop-anti racism books.
• 
  Em

  (dnf) This book is full of important, rarely discussed, U.S. history, but readers need to be willing to read something more academic than many of the other popular books being published now about racism and colonialism. This isn't a critique at all, the history covered in here deserves somber and thorough treatment. I want to revisit this book again someday, but it's too intense and dense for me to finish right now.
• 
  Pearl

  “The United States has never been ‘a nation of immigrants.’ It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, and German. The vortex of settler colonialism sucked immigrants through a kind of seasoning process of Americanization . . . .”
  
  This quote comes from the first paragraph in this book’s Conclusion. It occurs almost word for word in its beginning and elsewhere throughout the book. The rest of the book mainly gives examples of this claim. In short, I suppose this is good construction: state your thesis and then support by argument and examples.
  
  If you, the potential reader, have any illusions left about American exceptionalism, be warned: Dunbar-Ortiz is out to smash them, unless by exceptionalism you are thinking exceptionally bad.
  
  Dunbar-Ortiz has three main points and many expansions thereon. No modifications, though. And not to mention the overriding thread running throughout her book – the Indigenous people of the continent and the Black slaves that were brought to the continent of course were not immigrants but conquered by the settlers so that they could take their land or brought and bought by the settlers to provide them with free labor. Her three major points, woven in and out throughout her book are these:
  
  1. The first Europeans to come to America came not as immigrants but as settlers, as settler colonialists. As with all colonialists, they took land away from the people who were already on the land they wanted, set up their own colonies excluding the original or Indigenous people there, and killed those who resisted them. They were not immigrants; they did not try to adapt to the culture to which they were coming. They came to settle and to dominate. And that pattern did not stop with the first settlers (Pilgrims, Puritans, early explorers who claimed their rights to land they did not own under the “Doctrine of Discovery”); the pattern continued until these usurpers reached the farthest opposite coast, appropriating the land of the Native Americans and going to war for the land long occupied by Mexicans under the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” America was founded in violence and it has been imperialist since its inception.
  2. But didn’t some immigrants come later, such as the Irish, the Scots, Germans, and other Europeans? Well, yes, these Europeans came later but they quickly became “settler colonialists.” The Scots Irish for example settled in Appalachia and soon were referred to as indigenous to that area, as if the land was vacant when they came and settled. As to the Irish, “despite their lowly state, . . . “ because the majority were light-skinned in a US culture obsessed with whiteness, they became US Americans inheriting the privileges of white settlers.” To inherit these privileges, the new arrivals not only had to be light skinned but also very patriotic. The Irish were. “A major factor in Irish acceptance of US patriotism was Irish republicanism, as they saw the United States as a prior colony of Britain that revolted and became a republic, not recognizing the settler colonialism in the US that was patterned after the English settler colonialism in Ireland.” More or less the same pattern is repeated with other “immigrants” from other European countries. Through a kind of “seasoning process” they became Americanized. The same was not true for people from African or Asian countries or from other non-white/light-skinned countries. Immigration exclusion acts were frequently passed against Asians (usually the Chinese); often attempts, sometimes successful, were made to deport them not for their misdeeds but because they didn’t belong, and a recent President rode to the Presidency by proclaiming that Mexicans who were coming to the US were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And once in the Presidency, made anti-Muslim bigotry an official policy as well as Muslim exclusion.
  3. But you want to argue, what about the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Laos? Aren’t they/weren’t they immigrants? No, Dunbar-Ortiz says, in main they were refugees from wars that the US started.
  
  Dunbar-Ortiz’ argument for America being a land of settler colonialism and against the belief that America is a nation of immigrants morphs into the concept of White racism: Who gets to be an American? She argues early in her book:
  
  “It is essential to understand that aggressive white nationalism and settler colonialism form the bedrock of US institutions and historical and continuing white nationalism . . . and that genocidal policy toward Indigenous nation and descendants of enslaved Africans always looms inside the US and has been extended globally by genocidal US policies and wars in the Pacific and the Caribbean, including Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and increasingly in Africa.”
  
  Such attitudes, often transformed into laws and policies, kept non-white people on the outside, kept them from being fully accepted as equal to white Americans, and/or fully accepted as American at all. She discusses President Theodore Roosevelt’s views extensively:
  
  “In his view, all the darker people were inferior, particularly Native Americans, who were destined to disappear completely. But he also regarded poor whites as inferior . . . . He theorized that a new race was born with testing of settlers’ survival skills in nature, creating a new kind of aristocracy destined to rule the world. The settler ‘stock’ that morphed into that superior species, Roosevelt asserted, was composed of Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, French Huguenots, and Germans and Dutch Protestants. . . . ‘If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined, . . . carrying with it to the grave those potencies upon which realization of man’s highest hope depends.’”
  
  And in 1908, a year after anti-Asian riots took place all along the Pacific coast, “President Theodore Roosevelt called for ‘unity of action’ among the Anglo states of the US, Canada, Australia, and Britain to promote a ‘White Pacific,’ in which white supremacy would dominate against ascendant Japanese power. Roosevelt dispatched the US Navy’s sixteen-battleship Pacific tour to demonstrate Anglo unity against the yellow peril that Japanese immigration represented. Roosevelt told a reporter for the ‘New York Times’ that the fleet would confirm that New Zealand and Australia were ‘white man’s countries.’ ”
  
  The term “yellow peril” was most often used to refer to the Chinese but we see it could be extended to include other Asians as well. A variation on this theme occurred when a deadly flu broke out in 1954, a flu that did not originate in Asia, Dunbar-Ortiz says, nonetheless was dubbed the “Asian flu.” (That this flu did not originate in China is one of Dunbar-Ortiz’ more questionable claims, but I include it here to demonstrate her sometimes, but not often, dubious claims.) And the current coronavirus, in all likelihood originating in Wuhan, China, commonly referred to as the Wuhan virus, has revealed the conditional nature of being an American if one is non-white. This is not a refutable claim. Violence has spiked against Chinese, who have lived in the U.S. for years, calling on them to “go home,” as if the U.S. has not long been their home. Another glaring example is the treatment of Japanese American citizens during WW II. They were not given their citizens rights of due process before being interned for the duration of the war unlike German Americans who were not interned. As Dunbar-Ortiz expands elsewhere in her book:
  
  “Like the Chinese and Mexican immigrants before them [referring to a diverse range of people who came to the U.S.], they experienced racialization, thereby lacking a key element of settler colonialism: potential whiteness. They or their children could become thoroughly Americanized but still remain contingent, even the son of a Kenyan who was twice elected President but whose citizenship was questioned by a substantial part of the population, including by the US president who followed him.’’
  
  So, in sum, it’s not that American has NO immigrants but, in the end, they are not fully American. And it is preferred that they come from countries like Norway, not from “shit-hole countries” in Africa. (Why Donald Trump thought Norwegians would want to immigrate to his America is left unsaid by him.)
  
  This is certainly not a book without merit. It rightly challenges us to look more honestly and more critically at our history and our tendency to congratulate ourselves on being "the greatest country in the world." The book is generally very well researched and documented. It is also fairly repetitive and perhaps tries to do too much, making the arguments sometimes feel like an overreach. The final two chapters might have been eliminated entirely. Sometimes I felt the repetitive nature of the book might have come from its chapters being part of other essays the author had written and then stuffed them into this book, but I do not know that.
  
  As a final note, it seemed to me that Aaron Burr is the only person in U.S. history that the author truly liked. She trashes Alexander Hamilton and the musical (!), writing that history and the musical left out, sanitized, or ignored the anti-immigrant nature of Hamilton’s beliefs and actions. Burr, on the other hand, she lauds as being devoted to the principles of the Enlightenment. She does not add that our slave-owning founders were as well. I might add that the same criticism is true of her book. In smashing the immigrant myths we have grown up with, she also ignores or deliberately leaves out some of the positive features of immigrant policies in America.
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  P.S. It may not be relevant but I was interested to learn that Dunbar-Ortiz considers herself to be of Indigenous heritage. She grew up in Central Oklahoma, the daughter of a sharecropper of Scots-Irish ancestry and a mother that Dunbar believes to have been partially Native American, although her mother never claimed to be Native and Dunbar-Ortiz grew up without any Native heritage. She has claimed that her mother denied her Native roots because she married Dunbar's father, a white tenant farmer.
  Dunbar-Ortiz is the author of several acclaimed history books, a former university professor, and now retired, a widely traveled lecturer and writer.
  
  
• 
  Robert

  Finished Not a Nation of Immigrants just in time for Thanksgiving! Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the American claim to be a “nation of immigrants” is a founding myth of the U.S. used to obscure the fact that the U.S. was founded as a white settler society that was based on the ethnic cleansing of native peoples, saying “If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.” It’s not that immigration is not important in U.S. history, but rather that immigration is not the defining characteristic of the United States. Not a Nation of Immigrants also points out that many of the immigrants who came & come to America are refugees, who are often fleeing crises that the U.S. fueled or instigated. The endnotes are mostly worth reading for further reading recommendations on the topics covered. Dunbar-Ortiz cites many interesting authors & titles. The first chapter about the musical Hamilton really drew me into the book. Not a Nation of Immigrants is a great intro to looking at the world through a de-colonial perspective.
• 
  Greg Bem

  This is how social justice books could be: a telling of history. Clearly not exhaustive but about as comprehensive as you can get and still super current in 2022.
• 
  Breann Thompson

  A solid but VERY academic read. The final two chapters felt disconnected from the rest of the project— making a slightly different point than the rest of the work.
  
  Some elements began to feel repetitive while others were long lists of historical moments strung together (without much supporting context— assuming the reader has plenty of background knowledge).
• 
  Ronnie

  This is the kind of book I wish more people read.It is a retelling of the American Experience via the eyes of people who have felt, been touched , and scarred by the development of this country.Whereas we as Americans have romanticized the westward growth this country it is very easy to not see the Erasure of the previous inhabitants. Amerindians. Slaves. The development and continuation of white supremacist. The variations of colour. Irish.....It is a piercing book that throttles your intellectual neck. So many casualties. And I haven't even mentioned the Chinese,,Vietnamese . Africa...MIddle East. Central/South America.. Sometimes the presentation is thick with details to the point you need to take a mind break for an hour or so. Everything is turned upside down .Clarity comes into focus.You begin to look a things a little different . Read it if you dare.
• 
  Eti

  essential reading.
• 
  Luke Spooner

  Very interesting. Learned a lot
• 
  Kristen

  Miss Roxanne was absolutely taking no prisoners in this book and was out for everyone’s necks. It’s an honest repudiation of the “nation of immigrants” narrative told in the US. Reading some of the other reviews, they said that the tone was mean and that’s why they didn’t like this book. Well duh, what the settler-colonial state did to this country is horrendous. Of course we’re mad.
  
  Excellent read and highly recommend in the journey of deconstructing the American mythos.
  
  
• 
  Tom

  An historical inquiry into how the phrase “a Nation of Immigrants” may seem well-intended, but ignores the indigenous experience, glosses over slavery, ignores a long history of exclusion of immigrants, and discredits migrants and refugees who often come to the country as a result of American interventions. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” continues with another excellent history, this time examining settler colonialism from the colonial period continuing through to Trump’s abhorrent immigration and border policies. It includes several chapters on a variety of ethnic group experiences, advocating for immigrants and indigenous to join together in recognition of a common cause. As Dunbar-Ortiz writes:
  
  “This book is a call for all those who have gone through the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge settler colonialism and the Americanization process that sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples. It’s a call too for descendants of original settlers to understand and reject settler colonialism and the romanticizing of original white settlers who were instrumentalized to reproduce white supremacy and white nationalism… Perhaps most important of all, this book is a call to acknowledge settler colonialism and to put away the myth that the United States is “a nation of immigrants.”… It will require that all oppressed people and educators take history into their own hands.”
  
  “The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers. Extermination and assimilation are the methods used. This is the very definition of genocide… “Genocide” is a legal term with a precise definition, enshrined in the international treaty the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, presented in 1948 and adopted in 1951. 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. As the senators feared, in 1951, the Civil Rights Congress, led by the cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) W. E. B. Du Bois and the opera star Paul Robeson, filed a petition in the United Nations titled We Charge Genocide.”
  
  “The Nazis’ adoption of the US pseudoscience of eugenics has been well documented. They borrowed US race laws and also the US strategy of continental imperialism, ethnically cleansing the land in order to populate it with white settlers, what the Nazis called Lebensraum. Less well known is Nazi officials’ interest in US racially determined immigration laws and citizenship requirements. Writing four years after the 1924 immigration act, Adolf Hitler, in the unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf, admiringly characterized the United States as “a race-state,” referring to the US racist immigration measures that began with Chinese exclusion in 1882 and expanded to other nationalities in 1924.”
  
  “As in the aftermath of all US wars, Christian evangelicals of all stripes flock in to convert the vulnerable and traumatized people. Viet Thanh Nguyen, who immigrated as a child with his Vietnam War refugee family, writes, “When we remember the wars that forced people to flee, oftentimes into the embrace of their colonizer or invader, then we can see that the immigrant story, a staple of American culture, must actually be understood, in many cases, as a war story.” Indeed, as of 2020, the US had been at war against Asian peoples for 122 years, killing millions of civilians and creating internal and migrating refugees and immigrants, many to the United States.”
  
  “Indeed, the question of whether imported enslaved Africans could be counted as immigrants in “a nation of immigrants” ideology gives discomfort; so, the answer for Lin-Manuel Miranda in the Hamilton fantasy was to make everyone Black and everyone an immigrant.”
  
  “[The gift of the Statue of Liberty from France] is Eurocentric and focused on one concept, liberty. The statue is of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty. She holds a plaque in her left hand inscribed with July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals, the date of the Declaration of Independence. Her feet are circled with a broken shackle and chain celebrating US abolition of slavery. France’s original idea for the gift occurred at the end of the Civil War. But the idea of liberation of the formerly enslaved rang hollow to those under the boot of a restored Southern order of racist repression. As the editor of the Black-owned newspaper the Cleveland Gazette, put it: “Liberty enlightening the world,” indeed! The expression makes us sick. This government is a howling farce. It cannot or rather does not protect its citizens within its own borders. Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the “liberty” of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the “liberty” of this country “enlightening the world,” or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme. 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.”
  
  “Ali’s family, like many Somalian refugees to the US, was placed in a poor Black neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, with forty thousand other Somalis already there. That neighborhood, like other poor, Black ones, had a legacy of crime, imprisonment, and overpolicing. He writes, “We looked at how our neighbors suffered, and we thought we are not them, we will not become them. To assimilate was to become black, and to become black, well, that was unimaginable. And so we encased ourselves in our Somali identity, as a shield against becoming black in America.””
  
  “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. “Wild, raging mobs of white men and women confronted armies of police, while youths in their teens and younger hurled rocks, bottles, and racial epithets at buses carrying terrified black youngsters to school.” 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.”
  
  “[James] Baldwin critiqued the tragedy of how the immigrants’ pursuing the lie of white supremacy “helped to steal the vitality from immigrant communities. . . . And in the debasement and defamation of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves.” He writes, “White people are not white; part of the price of the ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they are.” Baldwin characterized the United States as a destination where Europeans of all sorts could be melded in contrast to “Negroes” and “Indians.” He writes, “No one was white before he/ she came to America”; rather, they were Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, English, French, Swiss, Norwegian. In the white Republic, one is either white, or not.”
  
  “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. 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.”
  
  — Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-ortiz
  
  https://a.co/cXmnHQn
• 
  Libertie

  "A revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  
  In this uniquely constructed history of the United States, author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demolishes the myth of the "nation of immigrants" using a combination of scholarly research, cultural criticism, and political commentary. Reading almost as
  An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States in reverse, chapters are devoted to the successive waves of migrants (incl. Scotch-Irish, Irish, Italian, Chinese, etc) and arrivants (those who arrived as a result of kidnappings and violent displacements incl. enslaved Africans and Central American refugees) who complicate the narrative of a liberal multiculturalism that emerged in the mid-1900s. Roxanne argues that the success of anti-colonial movements abroad and the Civil Rights Movement domestically forced the US American ruling class to rebrand its national identity, retiring explicitly white nationalist rhetoric in favor of a land of opportunity available to all (the "American Dream"). Needless to say, the foundation remained intact.
  

  "The claim that the United States is "a nation of immigrants" is the benevolent version of US nationalism.... US leftists have long compensated for their critiques of US capitalism and imperialism by waiving the flag or celebrating Tom Paine."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  
  Roxanne offers sharp criticism of liberals and even those on the Left who have promoted a "friendly" nationalism that wallpapers over the genocidal settler colonialism at the core of Americanism. And while Roxanne dips into stories of solidarity and internationalism (e.g. Irish immigrants who defected when faced with US imperialism in the Mexican-American War, Hugh Thompson's intervention in the Mỹ Lai massacre, etc), it's clear that pro-labor and anti-racist movements have largely fallen short as allies or, often enough, actually reinforced the erasure of Native peoples.
  
  Readers in my community may be especially interested in the extensive treatment given to "self-indigenization," including the settler claims to indigeneity and the appropriation of anti-colonial discourse in Appalachia.
• 
  Steve

  Oof, what a frustrating book.
  
  I agree with and appreciate the big ideas she's advancing here--essentially, that "nation of immigrants" mythology erases the genocide and imperialism inherent in U.S. settler colonialism--but too many of the aspects she covers here are too familiar me--and likely to anyone who's already done a bit of reading on the matter--for most of those discussions to be particularly illuminating, and I can't consider it a solid one-volume introduction to the topic because neither the writing nor the reliability of her facts are as strong as they could be.
  
  With respect to the last point, if I recognize some factual claims to be inaccurate, I can't have confidence in the factuality of claims I don't yet know about one way or the other.
  Two examples:
  On page xix (hardcover edition) of the Introduction, she writes that "the founders inscribed in the Constitution the requirement that citizenship could be held by white males only." Where in the Constitution is this written? Functionally, it is certainly true that no one but white men were full citizens, but her phrasing suggests it's written explicitly in the Constitution. I suspect she may be attributing to the Constitution the Naturalization Act of 1790's requirement of whiteness for citizenship, at least.
  
  Second, she later writes, "Four officers who led the war in Mexico went with the Confederacy as generals: [Lee, Braxton Bragg, Stonewall Jackson, and PGT Beauregard], while seven stayed with the United States Army: James Longstreet, Ulysses S. Grant....." Really? Longstreet? Longstreet was a major Confederate general, even if he was anomalously and significantly a Republican in the Reconstruction period and thereafter.
  
  I feel like there were at least a couple others that I didn't make careful note of, but you can perhaps imagine how these undermine my confidence. Between this kind of thing and the general lack of either conceptual novelty or a compelling deployment of familiar concepts toward a tightly coherent argument, there's no incentive to prioritize finishing this over moving on to other books.
  
  All that said, though, I do have to give her credit for the discussion of "Settler claims to indigeneity in Appalachia" in the middle of Chapter 2. She rebuts pretty persuasively Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow, a book I previously found pretty persuasive, and similar Appalachia Studies. These 8 pages might alone make it worth my hanging on to our copy. They don't, however, stop the rest of the book from being weaker than it should be.
• 
  Brody Seaton

  This book took me over two weeks to finish, but it was totally worth it. Roxanna Dunbar-Ortiz dispels the myth that we are a “nation of immigrants” and puts into context the horrific realities of settler colonial genocide and enslavement. Her analysis in regards to what actually drives migration (US imperialism, CIA coups, and free trade agreements), as opposed to the benign idea that people come here simply looking to fulfill the American dream was very insightful. I used to proudly proclaim that America was a nation of immigrants, but this book really forces you to reckon with the merits backing that saying. Although we might view it as a defense of immigrants subject to abysmal conditions, the phrase itself became a convenient response from the ruling class to demands for decolonization, justice, and social equality in the 1960s. The change of pace for inclusion in the American empire; instead of decolonizing and fundamentally transforming the social structure, has only served as a tool for the autocracy in their efforts at maintaining racial and economic inequality. This phrase is used as a retort for radical demands masqueraded under the guise of “diversity” and “inclusion” into a system that is fundamentally unjust. Any serious endeavor at atonement for our past atrocities is futile without decolonization and reparations. As Dunbar-Ortiz emphasizes, this book is a call to recognize colonization and imperialism as inherent to the founding of the United States. It is up to readers, writers, educators, activists, and oppressed people of all kinds to “take history into their own hands.” This book, if anything, is a counter- yet undoubtedly objective- history of the United States. I deeply admire Dunbar-Ortiz’s courage in writing this book, as well as all historians and educators who are willing to tell the truth about US history in a time where fascists are working tirelessly to silence true education.
• 
  Caleb Lagerwey

  This book was useful in providing a couple of interesting stories and perspectives that I hadn't heard or considered before, but it was limited in its effectiveness because of its (dis)organization. Perhaps I just don't think in patterns similar to the author--I've had this problem with other books of hers--but the chapter sequences and even the sections within chapters didn't make logical sense to me. This created a disjointed feeling as I read the book, leaving me unsure as to where the story was heading and unable to follow a cohesive thread throughout a chapter, let alone the whole book. There were also some glaring inaccuracies that distracted me; for example, Teddy Roosevelt was not William McKinley's Vice President during the Spanish American War since Roosevelt fought in the war and only came to national prominence because of his famous exploits in the war. I appreciated Dunbar-Ortiz's passion for Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and that passion shone through the whole book, as did her argument that all non-Natives living in the US are complicit in the settler colonialism that continues to haunt the US. I recommend it be read once by those interested in racial justice, Indigenous history, or immigration; it can then be excerpted as needed for students or further research.
• 
  Tim Dugan

  Quite informative about the USA's racist past. Who knew all that about Hamilton? Although Hamilton isn't really the focus.
  
  clarifies definition of Genocide.
  
  In minor ways, overlaps with Forget The Alamo.
  
  Much of what it says makes sense, but I dont know that i completely agree with the whole conclusions.
  
  Much the way one sympathizes with the children born to illegal immigrants (DREAM ACT) i feel some sympathy to all people who are born into the situation they live in. My ancestors were (in part) colonialists. That doesn't make me one.
  
  Yes, Little House on the Prairie is (a little) colonial and subtly genocidal toward the native people. :)
  
  It's worth reading but draw your own conclusions
• 
  Jena

  I don't think it would truly be fair to give this book a star rating. It's like a five on the importance of the concept, a two on the read/listenability of it and a four for making me think but I had to grit my teeth to get through it, and not because of the damning truths but because it is dense and dry. I appreciate both all the hard facts and statistics as well as why the author had to back up their thesis with the numbers and citations - it just makes for such an impenetrable book and I fear they may lose less committed readers
• 
  Amy C

  This book is very well researched and covers a lot of ground. As some other reviews have noted, the breadth of the subjects this book covers makes it disjointed and disorganised at times. I struggled to really get into it but I think that the subject matter is important and will hopefully stick better with other readers.
• 
  Grant

  It’s funny reading reviews of this book when they get mad that Hamilton wasn’t historically accurate. Dunbar-Ortez has managed to succinctly bust a lot of myths around America’s colonised history. I highly recommend reading the books referenced in here especially Chomsky’s works.
• 
  Amy

  "White people are not white. Part of the price of a ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they are...No one was white before he/she came to America. Rather, they were Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, English, French, Swiss, Norwegian. In the white republic, one is either white or not."
  - James Baldwin, a twentieth century writer and activist, as quoted in Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
  
  "To have no identity at all is the privilege of whiteness, which is the identity that pretends not to have an identity, that denies how it is tied to capitalism, to race, and to war."
  - Viet Thanh Nguyen, a twenty-first century novelist and professor, as quoted in Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
  
  Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion is an exploration and criticism of white supremacy in the context of colonialist legacies, arguing that the entire US is built upon a centuries long war of genocide against indigenous people and that this mindset (total war with the goal of utter destruction and dispossession to the benefit of settlers) still forms the framework of white supremacy as a movement and is at the core of government actions and policies even today.
  
  In the text, Dunbar-Ortiz criticizes that much on the subject of race focuses on black/white dichotomies that arose in the aftermath of the pillage and dispossession of indigenous peoples, and that this erases a crucial dimension of white supremacy and people affected by that mindset. Furthermore, she explores the effect of white supremacy and race not just in the context of black/white dichotomies - although she acknowledges that does play an important role in 'becoming white,' by which she means being viewed and treated as a settler - but also in the context of continued racial panics (Europeans that were not at the time considered white, like the Irish; Asian, and particularly Chinese; Central and South American, particularly Mexican), social/economic/political incentives for engaging in these panics (such as the positive engagement with white supremacy that were a large factor in the Irish coming to seen as white, for which they were rewarded with social status and economic power), and the role of US military power/deployments in facilitating or even directly creating the circumstances leading to the racial panics (such as the literally hundreds of military-intelligence operations in Central and South America that has directly led to the circumstances causing thousands to seek asylum in the US). Not a Nation of Immigrants highlights not only the events, but also the meaning and implications, of US history that speak to a pervasive and current issues with the role of race in American society, particularly where those issues deny the basis upon which they live: "that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources, reducing the indigenous population and forcibly relocating and incarcerating them in reservations."
  
  Not a Nation of Immigrants is a well written book about an aspect of US history and culture that many ignore or deny because it is strange and uncomfortable to acknowledge both the celebrations wrought by triumphs and the depredations wrought by those same triumphs. It is a book that I would recommend.
• 
  Danielle T

  4.5 stars rounded up to 5 (minor issue in the library copy, where footnotes in chapter 4 got misnumbered by 10 and it took me a second to square up sources). Dunbar-Ortiz makes a persuasive argument that "nation of immigrants" is a misnomer that overlooks the genocide of indigenous populations and how in actuality, the United States is a settler-colonial state, with various populations either adhering to the settler state in the name of assimilation (Irish and Italian Catholics) and self-indigenizing (New Mexican Hispanos, Appalachian Scots Irish) or being considered a Perpetual Foreigner and not permitted to settle (Asian laborers and refugees).
  
  There's also a strong lambasting of how Hamilton: The Musical falsely portrays some founding fathers as abolitionists when above all else they were capitalists (Alexander Hamilton himself in particular), creating a fiscal-military state to perpetuate war on indigenous populations and then copy those war efforts to imperialist efforts both on the continent with the annexation of Mexican territory and meddling in overseas governments.
  
  Unfortunately, the people whom I think need this most aren't partial to reading academically focused books (and I'd consider this an approachable, popular audience survey on settler colonialism)- thinking in particular of an Irish American work colleague in Knights of Columbus who very much wraps himself up in Catholicism & patriotism even though he has far more in common with the "illegals" he rails against with facebook memes. Very much worth a read, though, to challenge the framework in which you view the United States. For me, it's recognizing the discomfort from belatedly realizing the depth of indigenous erasure when discussing "Americanness" (for I can speak from experience about Perpetual Foreigner, but how am I perpetuating systemic genocidal frameworks in doing so?)
  
  From the conclusion:
  “This book is a call for all those who have gone through the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge settler colonialism and the Americanization process that sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples. It’s a call too for descendants of original settlers to understand and reject settler colonialism and the romanticizing of original white settlers who were instrumentalized to reproduce white supremacy and white nationalism.”