Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Not a Nation of Immigrants - Notes

 The book takes its title from President Kennedy's book A Nation of Immigrants which she claims inspired the idea of looking at our country this way.  She says this only partly true.  More of us are descendants of settler colonialists and decendants of slaves than immigrants.

So the opinion that we are a nation of immigrants is false according to this historian.  That we live in a nation of opportunity---founded and built  by immigrants---became a convenient response by the ruling class and brain trust to the 1960's demands for decolonization, reparations, justice, and social equality.

This widely-accepted feel good myth deflects from our settler colonialism, slavery, genocide, and white  supremacy origins.

The author purports to tell the true, complex and sobering history of these United States.