Is American an ethnicity? Under U.S. federal law and official statistics, no. “American” is a nationality tied to citizenship, not one of the racial or ethnic categories the government uses to classify people, and it is not a protected ethnic class under anti-discrimination law. That said, roughly 17.8 million people write “American” as their ancestry on Census surveys, and scholars have argued for decades about whether a shared American identity carries an ethnic or cultural dimension beyond its civic one.
What the Federal Government Counts as Race and Ethnicity
The Office of Management and Budget sets the classification framework through Statistical Policy Directive No. 15. It lists seven minimum categories every federal agency must use: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Middle Eastern or North African, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and White.1SPD15 Revision. Categories and Definitions “American” is not on the list. Each category is defined by ancestral and geographic origin, not by citizenship or civic identity. “White,” for example, refers to people with origins in the original peoples of Europe.2U.S. Census Bureau. About Race
The Census Bureau describes its racial categories as reflecting “social definitions rather than biological, genetic, or anthropological definitions,” and data collection relies on self-identification.2U.S. Census Bureau. About Race Race and ethnicity, in the government’s usage, are social constructs anchored to ancestral geography. An American citizen of any background checks a box describing their origins; there is no “American” box to check.
The 17.8 Million Who Write “American” Anyway
Census forms allow respondents to write in an ancestry, and a large number choose “American.” The 2022 American Community Survey counted 17.8 million people who did so, making it one of the most commonly reported ancestries in the country.3U.S. Census Bureau. 2020 Census DHC-A White Population
These respondents cluster heavily in the South and Appalachia. Researchers call them “unhyphenated Americans,” people who decline to specify a European origin when asked about ancestry.4IDS Publication. A Swing Vote Many are descendants of early British Isles settlers, particularly the Scots-Irish who populated the Appalachian frontier in the 1700s. Over generations, older Old World labels faded, and people came to see their ancestry as simply American.5CNN. Word of the Week: Scots-Irish The term “Heritage American” is sometimes used the same way, describing people who trace their roots to the Revolutionary or Civil War eras and no longer identify with a specific European nationality.
The pattern carries political weight. Research has found that counties with high concentrations of “American”-ancestry respondents have shifted steadily toward the Republican Party since the mid-1990s, and that this trend predates any single candidate or election cycle.4IDS Publication. A Swing Vote Writing “American” on a Census form is rarely a neutral demographic act. It often signals a particular relationship to national identity and culture.
Nationality Versus Ethnicity
Some of the confusion around this question comes from mixing two different concepts. Legally, “American” is a nationality. The Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and was deliberately designed as a non-racial category.6National Archives. 14th Amendment It was drafted to overrule Dred Scott v. Sanford, which had denied citizenship on the basis of African descent, and its framers explicitly decided the rule would apply regardless of race.7Harvard Law School. Can Birthright Citizenship Be Changed
Ethnicity is a broader concept, generally understood as linked to shared cultural expression, language, religion, customs, and ancestral origins.8MOST Policy Initiative. Legal Definitions of Race An American citizen can be ethnically Irish, Nigerian, Korean, or Navajo. The two categories do different work: nationality describes legal membership in a political community, while ethnicity describes shared heritage and cultural practice within or across political communities.
The line is not always clean. Comparative research on 15 countries has found that most nations, including those typically described as “civic,” have significant ethnic and cultural components to their national identities.9Columbia University. Civic and Ethnic Nations and Nationalism The blur exists everywhere, not only in the United States.
What Anti-Discrimination Law Protects
Federal law does not recognize “American” as a protected ethnic category, but the legal definitions of race and ethnicity are broader than many people assume. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.10National Archives. Civil Rights Act of 1964 The Department of Justice defines national origin discrimination as targeting someone based on their birthplace, ancestry, culture, or language.11U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Protections Against National Origin Discrimination
Two Supreme Court decisions in 1987 significantly expanded what counts as race in this context. In Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji, the Court unanimously held that a man of Iraqi Arab descent could bring a racial discrimination claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1981, even though Arabs are generally classified as Caucasian under modern taxonomy. When the civil rights statutes were enacted in the 1860s, the Court reasoned, Congress understood “race” broadly enough to cover ethnic and ancestral groups that would not be considered separate races today.12Oyez. Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji The same day, in Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, the Court applied the same logic to hold that Jewish people could claim racial discrimination under § 1982.13Justia. Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb
The principle both cases share is that the law protects “identifiable classes of persons who are subjected to intentional discrimination solely because of their ancestry or ethnic characteristics,” regardless of how modern science would classify them.14Library of Congress. Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji, 481 U.S. 604 Justice Brennan noted in concurrence that the line between discrimination based on ancestry and discrimination based on place of origin “is not a bright one.”15UCLA Law Review. Expansion of Section 1981 Protections
Could “American” ever function as a legally cognizable ethnicity under this framework? In theory, the Saint Francis College approach directs courts to look at ancestry and ethnic characteristics rather than rigid modern racial categories. In practice, anti-discrimination law is built to protect groups that face discrimination because of their perceived difference from a majority. A claim of discrimination for being “American” in the United States would run into a structural problem: the identity is associated with the majority rather than with a marginalized group targeted for its distinctiveness.
Why Scholars Still Disagree
Beyond the legal question, academics have debated the nature of American identity for decades. The positions cluster into a few camps.
One view treats American identity as fundamentally civic. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s concept of “constitutional patriotism,” it holds that what makes someone American is allegiance to shared political ideals — liberty, equality, democratic self-governance — rather than any shared bloodline, language, or cultural tradition.16American Academy of Arts and Sciences. What Does It Mean to Be American The strength of this model is that it accommodates enormous diversity. The criticism is that it may be too thin to hold a nation together, and that it ignores a history in which the country has often defined belonging in racial and cultural terms.
A second view, sometimes called liberal nationalism, argues that a shared national culture is necessary for social solidarity, even without a basis in biological descent. Political scientist Samuel Huntington made a prominent version of this argument in his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, contending that the American creed of individual rights, rule of law, and limited government is itself a product of a specific “Anglo-Protestant culture” and cannot survive without it.17Claremont Review of Books. The Crisis of American National Identity Huntington maintained that “Americans of all races and ethnicities, immigrants and nonimmigrants, can and have absorbed this country’s Anglo-Protestant culture.”18CIAO Test (Columbia University). Huntington-Wolfe Exchange in Foreign Affairs Sociologist Amitai Etzioni called the book a “theory of fear” and cited data showing that by the third generation, two-thirds of Hispanic immigrants spoke only English and more than half intermarried.19American Sociological Association. Etzioni Review of Huntington
The “American Equals White” Finding
A body of experimental research complicates any straightforward claim that “American” is an inclusive, non-ethnic identity. Using Implicit Association Tests and related methods, researchers have documented a persistent tendency to associate “American” with “White” at an unconscious level, with European Americans treated as more prototypically American than African, Asian, Latino, or Native Americans.20National Library of Medicine. American Equals White Implicit Bias Research
The effect appears even among people who explicitly endorse inclusive, civic definitions of the term. Social dominance theory reads it as a form of status maintenance, with the dominant group perceived as having “ownership” of the national identity. The bias is not fixed. Experiments have shown that framing minority individuals through personal rather than ethnic lenses, or associating them with national service, increases their perceived “Americanness.”20National Library of Medicine. American Equals White Implicit Bias Research
Related work on Latino populations has found that experiences of discrimination make individuals less likely to identify simply as “American” and more likely to adopt hyphenated or pan-ethnic labels. Sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza has described this as “racialized assimilation,” in which becoming part of American society can reinforce ethnic distinctiveness rather than erase it.21JSTOR. Dropping the Hyphen
Native Americans as a Distinct Case
One group has a genuinely distinctive claim to “American” identity in an indigenous sense. The federal government recognizes 574 tribal nations, and their legal status is classified as political rather than racial, resting on a government-to-government relationship rooted in treaties and sovereignty that predates the United States.22Native American Rights Fund. Frequently Asked Questions Tribal membership is determined by each nation’s own laws and is legally distinct from the Census Bureau’s “American Indian or Alaska Native” racial category.23University of Colorado Law School. They Were Here First
The distinction has real legal consequences. Federal programs and protections for tribal nations rest on the political relationship rather than racial classification, and courts review them under rational-basis rather than the strict scrutiny that applies to race-based government actions. Some legal advocates have challenged tribal sovereignty laws as unconstitutional racial preferences; tribal nations and their supporters argue that conflating political status with race misunderstands the nature of tribal sovereignty.23University of Colorado Law School. They Were Here First
The Short Answer
Whether “American” counts as an ethnicity depends on who is asking and why. In the federal classification system used for the Census and civil rights enforcement, the answer is no: “American” is a nationality, and the racial and ethnic categories the government tracks are defined by ancestral origin. In anti-discrimination law, “American” does not function as a protected ethnic class, and the doctrine that protects ancestry-based groups was built around minorities facing discrimination for their difference from a majority. In lived identity, millions of people write “American” as their ancestry, most of them a specific demographic concentrated in the South and Appalachia, and that self-identification carries real cultural and political meaning. The scholarly question of whether the country’s shared identity has an ethnic dimension remains genuinely contested.