The United States likes to sell itself as a place where anyone can arrive from somewhere else and gradually become part of a shared “we.” At the same time, it has always drawn hard lines around that “we” and argued over who really counts as American. Underneath those arguments sits ethnocentrism: the tendency to divide the world into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the in-group as more normal, more moral, and more deserving. Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam show, in a very explicit way, that this kind of us-versus-them thinking is not a marginal prejudice but a stable feature of mass opinion in the United States, shaping how people feel about immigrants, minorities, welfare, crime and foreign policy (Kinder and Kam 2009).
The puzzle is that American national identity is officially built on universal principles rather than ancestry. The United States is supposed to be a civic nation based on a constitution, not an ethnic nation based on blood. In practice, the story has always mixed civic ideals with ethnocentric habits. The result is a country that talks about liberty and equality while constantly arguing over language, religion, race and “real Americans.”
From Anglo-Protestant Republic to Immigration Society
At the founding, Americanness was not a neutral category. The people who wrote the basic texts of the republic imagined the nation in their own image: white, Anglo-Protestant, English speaking, landowning, and male. Early citizenship and naturalization rules reflected this. Non-white people were excluded or subordinated by law, Native nations were treated as obstacles to expansion, and the institution of slavery sat at the core of the economic and political order. The first clear layer of American identity fused political ideals with a very specific ethnocultural model.
As the country expanded and industrialized, mass immigration shook this picture. Irish and German Catholics, then Italians, Jews, Slavs, and others arrived in large numbers. They were often treated as racially suspect, not fully white in the social sense, even when the law classified them as “white persons” for naturalization. Historical work on the “becoming white” narrative describes how many European groups moved, over generations, from the margins of whiteness into its core, gaining access to the material and symbolic benefits tied to the category “white American” while Black, Indigenous, Asian and Mexican people remained firmly outside that status (Omi and Winant 2015).
By the mid twentieth century, this process had created a layered racial order. A widened set of Europeans had become accepted as “us.” African Americans, Indigenous peoples, Latinos and Asians were still positioned as internal outsiders, tolerated or controlled but rarely imagined as prototypical Americans. Michael Omi and Howard Winant describe this as a racial state: a state that constantly organizes and reorganizes race through law, policing, welfare policy, war and representation, so that national identity and racial hierarchy are tightly fused (Omi and Winant 2015).
Civil rights struggles, decolonization abroad, and the 1965 overhaul of immigration law pushed this system again. New migrants from Asia, Latin America and Africa arrived under a formal regime of legal equality. Public rhetoric moved toward colour-blindness and civic inclusion. Yet the older racial maps did not vanish; they were redrawn and relabeled. To call the United States a “melting pot” at that point was less a description than an aspiration and, sometimes, a way of denying how unequal the ingredients remained.
Different Theories Of What The Nation Is
Because the United States is so obviously diverse and so obviously unequal, scholars have spent decades arguing about what kind of national identity it actually has. A classic starting point is the distinction between civic and ethnic nationhood. Rogers Brubaker’s work on France and Germany showed two strong models: a territorial, civic tradition in which anyone born and socialized in the territory can claim membership, and a descent-based tradition in which the nation is imagined as a community of blood (Brubaker 1992).
The United States officially tells a civic story. Anyone, in theory, can become American by swearing loyalty to the constitution and living within the law. In practice, the picture is messier. Deborah Schildkraut’s research on American identity finds that when you actually ask people what it means to be American, three strands appear again and again: a liberal tradition that stresses individual rights and freedoms, a civic republican tradition that stresses participation and duty, and an ethnocultural tradition that ties Americanness to Christianity, English and ancestry (Schildkraut 2007; Schildkraut 2011).
Samuel Huntington pushed the ethnocultural line very hard in his book Who Are We? He argued that the United States has an Anglo-Protestant cultural core that created its institutions and values, and that large scale immigration from Latin America, especially Spanish-speaking, Catholic Mexico, threatened to split the country into two cultural blocs (Huntington 2004). His argument is heavily criticized on empirical and normative grounds, but it is important because it captures a mood that still circulates: the feeling that “real” American identity is tied to a particular historical majority culture, and that pluralism is tolerated only as long as it does not disturb that core.
Against that, theorists of multiculturalism such as Will Kymlicka argue that modern democracies cannot pretend to be culturally neutral. States inevitably privilege some languages, histories and symbols over others, and they therefore owe special protections and recognition to minorities, whether they are Indigenous peoples, historical national minorities, or immigrants (Kymlicka 1995). This perspective fits better with a vision of the United States as a multinational and multiethnic polity, where different groups negotiate status, rights and representation instead of dissolving into a single dominant culture.
Alongside these national identity theories sits racial formation theory. Omi and Winant insist that race is not a biological fact or just a set of attitudes, but an ongoing political process through which states, movements and institutions create, reshape and fight over racial categories. National identity, in their view, cannot be separated from this process. The American “we” has always been racialized, even when it is expressed in universal language. Legal categories, census boxes, immigration quotas, residential segregation and policing practices all help define who is read as inside or outside the national community (Omi and Winant 2015).
Put together, these frameworks explain why arguments about American identity are so intense. People are not only debating symbols; they are defending incompatible theories of what holds the country together: a culture, a creed, a race, a set of institutions, or some unstable combination of all of these.
Ethnocentrism In American Political Conflict
Kinder and Kam’s work on ethnocentrism in the United States starts from a simple definition: ethnocentrism is the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups, to favour the in-group and to distrust outsiders. They then show that this tendency is widespread, not just among committed ideologues, and that it has real consequences for political preferences (Kinder and Kam 2009).
On immigration, ethnocentric citizens are more likely to see newcomers as a cultural threat, more likely to support restrictive policies, and more likely to endorse assimilationist demands. They may talk about crime or jobs, but their responses track perceptions of difference even when economic factors are controlled. On welfare and social spending, ethnocentrism makes people more suspicious of programmes they associate with racial or cultural out-groups. On crime, it amplifies support for punitive measures when the imagined offender is an outsider.
Deborah Schildkraut’s surveys show that people who tie Americanness strongly to ancestry, Christianity and English are more hostile to bilingual education, official accommodations for minority cultures and relaxed immigration rules. Those who define Americanness more in terms of respecting laws and institutions, or supporting equality, are more open to pluralism, even if they still disagree on particular policies (Schildkraut 2007, 2011).
Foreign policy attitudes also carry this imprint. The same us-versus-them structure that sorts domestic groups into insiders and outsiders also sorts countries into friends and enemies. Citizens with strong ethnocentric views are more inclined to favour using military force in culturally distant regions, more likely to see international organisations as constraints on national will, and less likely to sympathise with foreigners who do not seem “like us.” That does not fully determine elite decisions, but it shapes the climate in which leaders operate and the stories that make sense to voters.
Who Gets Read As American In Everyday Life
Beyond formal politics, ethnocentrism shows up in small, repetitive interactions. Someone with an accent is praised for their English as if it is surprising that they speak it well. An Asian American is asked where they are “really” from. A Black American is treated as suspicious in a shop or a traffic stop in ways that white neighbours are not. A Muslim American is expected to perform loyalty every time there is a terrorist attack abroad.
Social psychologists who study implicit bias find that, in experimental settings, people more readily associate the category “American” with white faces than with non-white faces, even when those non-white faces are of citizens born and raised in the United States. Those associations show up as tiny delays in reaction time on computerized tasks and as patterns in survey data. They translate into a quiet, everyday hierarchy in which some people are intuitively granted full membership and others are mentally tagged as partial or conditional members.
Racial formation theory helps explain why this is so stubborn. Racial meanings are reproduced not only in laws and open prejudice but in media images, school curricula, cultural narratives and institutional routines. If films, textbooks and news stories centre a particular kind of body and voice as the default American, those who do not fit that template must constantly claim and defend their belonging.
Comparative Angles: How Other States Live With Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is a global pattern. What changes across countries is who the “we” is, how it was historically defined, and what institutions do with it.
Many Western European states built national identities around a dominant ethnocultural majority. The French and German cases Brubaker analysed are classic examples: France moving toward a civic, territorial definition of citizenship while still assuming a certain cultural model, Germany grounding membership for a long time in descent and ethnic community (Brubaker 1992). When large scale postcolonial and labour immigration brought in workers from North Africa, Turkey, South Asia and elsewhere, the older models were strained. Fights about headscarves, mosques, “parallel societies” and “integration” show ethnocentrism trying to defend a historical core culture under new conditions.
Settler democracies like Canada and Australia have tried to stabilise diversity by codifying multiculturalism. Official policy in both countries speaks openly about multiple cultures coexisting within the nation, points to immigration as an economic and social asset, and recognises Indigenous peoples as foundational. Yet even there, ethnocentrism appears in moral panics about asylum seekers, in resentment toward “foreign” customs, and in resistance to fully confronting colonial histories.
In parts of East Asia, national identity is wrapped around narratives of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Japan and South Korea both constructed modern national identities with a strong sense of shared blood and tradition. Immigration there has been more limited, and debates about long-term settlement by foreigners often turn very quickly into existential questions about national continuity. Ethnocentrism is not about reclaiming a lost homogeneity; it is about protecting a homogeneity that many people believe still exists, even as labour markets, marriage patterns and demographic decline suggest otherwise.
Looking across these cases makes one thing clear: the American experience is not uniquely ethnocentric and not uniquely pluralistic. What is distinctive is that the United States has been multiethnic on a continental scale for a very long time, has projected a universalistic ideology outward, and has used race so centrally in organising its internal hierarchies. The national identity project has always had to juggle those facts.
Pushing Back Against Ethnocentrism Without Pretending It Disappears
Ethnocentrism is not a switch that can be turned off. It is a habitual way of organising the social world. What can change is how much weight it carries in public life, how it is channelled, and what counter-forces exist.
Education is one obvious site. When history is told almost exclusively from the point of view of one group, everyone else is cast as a temporary guest or a problem. Rewriting curricula to integrate Indigenous, Black, Latino, Asian American and immigrant histories as central rather than peripheral changes the imagined “we.” It is not enough to add a token month or a few sidebars. The entire narrative of settlement, slavery, expansion, industrialization and empire has to be retold so that different groups appear as co-authors of the national story, not as background characters.
Contact is another. Gordon Allport’s classic work on intergroup contact argued that prejudice is more likely to fall when people from different groups interact regularly under conditions of equal status and shared goals. Later research has refined that view but generally supports the idea that structured, cooperative contact can soften ethnocentric attitudes over time. Spatial segregation, by contrast, gives stereotypes room to grow unchecked, because people rely on second-hand stories and selective media images rather than direct experience.
Policy is a third lever. Anti-discrimination laws, fair housing enforcement, voting rights protections, and inclusive immigration rules do not, by themselves, change hearts. They do, however, limit the ways ethnocentric instincts can be turned into direct material harm. Over time, when institutions treat people more equally, the social meaning of group boundaries can shift. When institutions encode exclusion, those boundaries harden and are reproduced across generations.
There is also a normative battle over what counts as legitimate patriotism. For some, loving the country means defending a supposedly continuous cultural core. For others, it means defending a constitutional order that promises equality and reworking it to make that promise more real. The first version leans heavily on ethnocentrism; the second version treats ethnocentrism as something to be criticised rather than celebrated. Intellectuals, artists, teachers and organisers play a role here in showing that national attachment does not have to mean hostility to difference.
American Identity As An Ongoing Argument
American identity is not a finished product. It is an argument that keeps being reopened every time a new group arrives, every time an old exclusion is challenged, every time the country fights a war or suffers a crisis. Ethnocentrism will remain part of that argument because people reach for familiar “us” and “them” stories when they are uncertain or afraid. The question is not whether ethnocentrism exists, but whether it is allowed to define the boundaries of belonging.
If American identity continues to be treated as the property of one cultural or racial group, then every demographic change will look like a threat, and every move toward equality will feel like a loss for those who started on top. If, instead, Americanness is treated as a contested civic project that different communities shape together, then diversity becomes less of a zero-sum game. Neither path is automatic. Both are being fought over right now, in elections, in school boards, in courts and in daily life.
The United States will keep calling itself a melting pot or a mosaic or a nation of immigrants. Those slogans only gain substance when the people who have historically stood at the centre of the “we” are willing to share that centre with others, and when institutions back that shift with law, resources and representation. Ethnocentrism will not disappear, but it does not have to be in charge of the story.
References
- Brubaker, Rogers. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Kinder, Donald R., and Cindy D. Kam. 2009. Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2015. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.
- Schildkraut, Deborah J. 2007. “Defining American Identity in the Twenty-First Century: How Much ‘There’ Is There?” Journal of Politics 69 (3): 597–615.
- Schildkraut, Deborah J. 2011. “National Identity in the United States.” In Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, edited by Seth J. Schwartz, Koen Luyckx, and Vivian L. Vignoles. New York: Springer.
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