America Is Not A Nation Of Immigrants w/ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - MR Live - 10/11/21

Sam and Emma host historian Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, to discuss her recent book Not A “Nation Of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, And A History Of Erasure And Exclusion, on the settler-colonial roots of the US and the impossibility of obscuring them, no matter how much liberals push the “melting pot” ideology. They start off with the coining of the term “nation of immigrants” by Senator John F. Kennedy in ’58, which was quickly adopted by the liberal US elite during their ‘60s fad of multiculturalism, and the status of which Biden has restored on the White House immigration page following Trump’s removal of it. To help emphasize the meaninglessness of this term, Dunbar-Ortiz helps define what a “settler state” is, and how the US has always been one; they start with the British origins of settler-colonialism and the replacement of local and indigenous peoples in Northern Ireland, before the empire moved on to New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and, of course, North America. While colonialism had existed since Columbus’ first arrival in the western hemisphere, the settler state brought about a new form of it, different even from the enslavement and exploitation of local peoples and resources engaged in by the Spanish, and saw the migration of Brits to new lands, while still claiming wholeheartedly their citizenship status to the British Empire. From a start that could not be more contrary to the concept of a “melting” of cultures, Roxanne, Emma, and Sam then dive into the nature of the US as a Fiscal Military state, made for and by war, as they laid claim to “property rights” across the world via militia, before they move to reflect on the connections between the myth of Columbus and the Americanization of white immigrant populations, and the cultural perception of whiteness that drives American ideology. She particularly looks into the birth of an explicitly racist warfare ideology during the Spanish Inquisition, ingraining this blood quantum view of whiteness into a certain Christian ideology, and touches on how the legacy of Columbus reaches back to the first founding of the US, with the District of Columbia, and continues to be central in the history of Americanizing foreign white folks. Sam and Emma also discuss the absurdity of pretending to care about Columbus Day, and watch the Bobby Jindal-funded Black-Box Republican-Theater-commercial that aired during this weekend’s Red Sox-Rays game.

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