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

Written by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Narrated by Shaun Taylor-Corbett

Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States

Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today.

She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity—founded and built by immigrants—was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good—but inaccurate—story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception.

While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beacon Press Audio
• Release date: Aug 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9780807036341

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is professor emerita at California State University.

Reviews for Not "A Nation of Immigrants"

[daumari · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.”