American Xenophobia: A Force From the Colonial Onset
Peter d'Errico
āWhy has xenophobia been such a force in a country built by immigrants?ā asked history Professor Moshik Temkin in a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times. Temkin provided no answer to his question. He posed it as an example of the type of historical inquiryāabout āsocial and political change over timeā¦the meat and potatoes of the historianās craftāāthat ought to take precedence over the sound-bite role historians play in current media debates.
I have no quarrel with Temkinās main point, his āworry about the rapid-fire, superficial way history is being presented, as if itās mostly a matter of drawing historical analogies. The result is that readers and viewers get history lessons that are often misleading when it comes to Mr. Trump, and shed little light on our current travails.ā Anyone familiar with Indian country knows the truth of this statement, and not simply about Trump. As Phillip Deere once said, referring to university students mimicking the stereotypical āIndian war cry,ā āThose kids went to university to get a higher education and why didnāt they get it? ⦠In their minds, theyāre still in John Wayne movies.ā
Nevertheless, Temkinās question itself carries a sound-bite view of historyānamely, the reference to āa country built by immigrants.ā This notion has become a kind of fetish in the polarized debates roiling the status of āforeignersā in the U.S. Those who embrace immigration frequently assert āwe are all immigrants.ā Opponents demand deportation of immigrants who are not ālegal.ā While both sides pat themselves on the back for their ācorrectness,ā neither steps back to examine the historyāthe āsocial and political change over timeāāthat would shed light on the issue. Letās pause and shed some light.
History problematizes the notion of āthe country.ā Many peoples had countries in these lands prior to the colonial invasion of Christian settlers. That those colonies would eventuate in a ācountryā called the United States does not erase the continuing existence of the original countries, despite the strenuous efforts of the colonizers, who resorted to genocide, political violence, and myth-making in their erasure attempts. The invadersāimmigrants to these landsāeven developed quasi-scientific historical narratives like the increasingly discredited notion of the Bering Strait theory to insist that the original peoples were themselves immigrants. This colonialist imagery reverberates in the rhetoric of those who support immigration by claiming weāre all immigrants.
The position of those who distinguish between ālegalā and āillegalā immigrants presents an equally problematic history. The most outlandish (to play with words: āoutlandishā means āforeignā) aspect of the insistence on ālegalityā arises from the colonizersā efforts to claim ātitleā to the lands they invaded through the āextravagant pretensionā of āChristian Discovery.ā The U.S. Supreme Court laid down that doctrine in 1823 (Johnson v. McIntosh), not to portray the original peoples as immigrants, but to dispossess them of their status as landowners and thereby ālegalizeā the status of the colonizers. This judicial sleight-of-hand echoes in the rhetoric of those who demand deportation of āillegal immigrants.ā
These historical precedents to the current debate allow us to suggest a response to Professor Temkinās question about xenophobia. A dictionary definition of xenophobia describes it as āintense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries.ā We probably canāt find a better word to describe the world-views of the Christian colonizers, who arrived with full-blown xenophobia directed at the āforeignā peoples they discovered in the ānew world.ā The fact that these peoples typically welcomed and even assisted the colonists had little effect on calming the outsiders xenophobia.
The āAmerican Empireā grew from a violent, messianic crusade to eliminate non-Christian peoples, practices, and beliefs everywhere it found them. Indeed, the command of Christian authorities was to āgo forth and multiply,ā and assert ādominion.ā Vatican decrees and colonial charters insisted that Christian ādiscoverersā were to dominate non-Christian peoples. In the Johnson case, the U.S. Supreme Court said, āThese claims have been maintained and established ⦠by the sword.ā The imposition of empire has not eliminated the original peoples, but the rhetoric of American law and politics obscures and disallows their existence as separate peoples.
As Jens Bartelson put it in his 1996 book, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, the 16th century ādiscovery of non-Christian forms of life in the Americas posed [a] ⦠threat to the stability of Christian values,ā which were already staggering from the āfragmentation of Christianityā in the āold world.ā Bartelson adds, āThe discovery of the American Indiansā¦posed the problem of [a] confrontation with something radically different from the Christian way of life [and] raised the question of what kind of relations it is possible to entertain with this Other. First, to what extent is it possible to know the Indian except as something inferior to the Christian civilization? Second, ⦠to what extent is it possible to [give] him the status of a legal subject?ā These very questions animated colonization and propelled the Johnson decision.
In short, xenophobiaāāintense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countriesāāhas characterized American history from its inception in rival colonies bent on domination and exploitation of the continent. The U.S. position on this has been consistent throughout the twists and turns of what we call āfederal Indian law,ā from the so-called āMarshall trilogyā of U.S. Supreme Court cases (Johnson v. McIntosh and the two Cherokee cases) through the Allotment Act and Termination policies and into the 21st century era of āgovernment-to-governmentā relations. The foundational position of the United States is that Indigenous Peoples of the continent are inherently subjugated to the political authority of the federal government. āColumbus Dayā and āThanksgivingā provide fantasy holidays for Americans to speak about the ādiscoveryā of the ānew world,ā trying to forget the bloodiness of the encounter.
Courts and politiciansāand even, strangely enough, some Native leadersāhave repeatedly emphasized what they call the āplenary powerā of the U.S. Congress to do as it wishes with Indians and Indian lands. A critical and accurate history of U.S. laws, including laws that many people think are āpro-Indian,ā shows the process at work: The 1924 Citizenship Act āfurther[ed] the project of assimilating Native Nations into the United States rather than recognizing their sovereignty.ā The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act āreplace[d] traditional governance structures with Western, electoral systemā¦tribal constitutions.ā The 1944 Indian Claims Commission was āthe beginning of the termination era.ā The āfriends of Indiansā calling for āequal rightsā today are aiming for the final elimination of separate Native Nationhood.
We return to Professor Temkinās call for historians to do āa better job of explaining Mr. Trump, and make clear that Americans can make a better history for themselves.ā It will not do to celebrate an āinclusivenessā that muddies the debateāas in the strange phenomenon of the Broadway show āHamilton,ā where non-white actors sing and dance the story of the white men who founded the federal scheme of empire-buildingānor will it be acceptable to sanctify ālegalā status as the determining factor of immigration rights. The history Americans have made still exists. The debate about immigrants requires addressing the legacy laws, practices, and policies that to this day exert a dominating force over the original peoples of the land.