Book report

Roxanne steers an unusual path that is fair while acknowledging our country’s failings and clumsy attempts by many to forge a false account of connected events, leaving forests behind.

Such attempts are nothing more than jury-rigging.

Claims that “America is a nation of immigrants” made by presidents are discordant with facts laid bare in this book. Raspy and jarring, she displays a lack of harmony with the famous line produced and discharged formally and with authority that America is a nation of immigrants.

For Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, that is a lot of guff! Openly conveying such sentiments, if myths, is harmful.

This fundamental change in approach reveals the true nature of America as it wrestles with settler colonialism, white supremacy, and history of erasure and omission. With a lone exception (Donald J. Trump), John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all paraded this feel-good myth.

She puts down that the official negation of the US as a nation of immigrants by Trump is unlikely to change the liberal rhetoric. To be clear, Trump is a son of a European immigrant mother and grandfather and is married to one. Maybe that is why he prefers people from Norway, not Haiti, Mexico, or Nigeria.

And Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers, was born in the Caribbean, was not an immigrant, and was no friend of immigrants, as this book shows. On the contrary, his Federalist Party pursued anti-immigrant policies, states Roxanne. Moreover, he enslaved people, as did George Washington.

She writes about the denial of American racism, with police violence as the most tangible expression of systemic racism. She confirms that police killings of black people have become visible with the presence and easy access to video recordings reducing unpublicized police killings.

She declares that “being black in the United States is a marker of slavery. Consequently, a black individual is a principal target of racial discrimination and violence, mimicking the violence imposed on black bodies under slavery.”

Addressing Arrivants, she bemoans some more known facts. First, “Enslaved Africans did not come to the Americas as immigrants, indentured servants, or settlers. Instead, indigenous agrarian villagers were kidnapped or taken as captives in wars, forced-marched in groups to the Atlantic coast.” Second, “they were transported across the ocean against their will and with violence so unbearable that many committed suicides.”

On Native Americans, she believes “the US republic was born from its birth the engine of capitalist accumulation in expropriating native land to sell to land speculators, slaves and later the railroads and white settlers, under the Homestead Act.’

This book provides insight into Settler Colonialism, Private Property on Steroids, Free-Soiler Imperialism, Settler-Colonialism as Genocide, and the Settler Move to Innocence. In addition, there are explanations of Settlers’ Claims to Indigeneity in Appalachia, Rancher Indigeneity, Irish Settling, Continental Imperialism, US Colonial Occupation, The Border, Americanizing Columbus, and more. (All her words)The longest chapter, “Yellow Peril,” highlights this country’s long history of anti-Asian sentiments in forty-eight pages.

Acclaimed reviews are in order: “Dunbar-Ortiz’s fascinating and accessible historical account forces a reckoning with the various layers of the US imperialist project, from territorial control to economic and political influence at the expense of Black populations, migrants, and indigenous peoples.” Alexandra Delano Alonzo

“A compelling counter-narrative to America’s autobiography as the making of “the nation of immigrants,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz not only chips away at this settler account but also provides the narrative glue for an emancipatory movement beyond the settler-native dichotomy.” Mammood Mamdani

Roxanne is the winner of the 2015 American Book Award; professor emerita, born in San Antonio, Texas, grew up in Oklahoma.

You must read this book!

PS: What is now Central Park in New York was a settlement of predominantly African Americans in the 19th century.

“This land is your land” by Woodie Guthrie is deep. Please read about it.