| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 21,227,906 6.6% of the US population in 2017 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Southern United States and Midwestern United States | |
| Languages | |
| English (American English dialects) | |
| Religion | |
| Predominantly Christianity (Mainly Protestantism) | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| American ancestries |
American ancestry refers to people in the United States who self-identify their ancestral origin or descent as "American", rather than the more common officially recognized racial and ethnic groups that make up the bulk of the American people. The majority of these respondents are visibly White Americans, who either simply use this response as a political statement or are far removed from and no longer self-identify with their original ethnic ancestral origins. The latter response is attributed to a multitude of generational distance from ancestral lineages, and these tend be of English, Scotch-Irish, or other British ancestries, as demographers have observed that those ancestries tend to be seriously undercounted in U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey ancestry self-reporting estimates. Although U.S. Census data indicates "American ancestry" is commonly self-reported in the Deep South and Upland South, the vast majority of Americans and expatriates do not equate their nationality with ancestry, race or ethnicity, but with citizenship and allegiance.
Historical reference
The earliest attested use of the term "American"
to identify an ancestral or cultural identity dates to the late 1500s,
with the term signifying "the indigenous peoples discovered in the
Western Hemisphere by Europeans." In the following century, the term "American" was extended as a reference to colonists of European descent. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies this secondary meaning as "historical" and states that the term "American" today "chiefly [means] a native (birthright) or citizen of the United States."
American westward expansion is idealized in Emanuel Leutze's famous painting Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1861). The title of the painting, from a 1726 poem by Bishop Berkeley, was a phrase often quoted in the era of "manifest destiny".
President Theodore Roosevelt asserted that an "American race" had been formed on the American frontier, one distinct from other ethnic groups, such as the Anglo-Saxons. He believed, "The conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race...." "We are making a new race, a new type, in this country." Roosevelt's "race" beliefs certainly weren't unique in the 19th and early 20th century. Eric Kaufmann has suggested that American nativism
has been explained primarily in psychological and economic terms to the
neglect of a crucial cultural and ethnic dimension. Kauffman contends
American nativism cannot be understood without reference to the theorem
of the age that an "American" national ethnic group had taken shape
prior to the large-scale immigration of the mid-19th century.
Nativism gained its name from the "Native American" parties of the 1840s and 1850s. In this context "Native" does not mean indigenous or American Indian but rather those descended from the inhabitants of the original Thirteen Colonies (Colonial American ancestry). These "Old Stock Americans", primarily English Protestants, saw Catholic immigrants as a threat to traditional American republican values, as they were loyal to the papacy.
Flag of the Know Nothing or American Party, c. 1850
Nativist outbursts occurred in the Northeast from the 1830s to the 1850s, primarily in response to a surge of Catholic immigration. The Order of United American Mechanics was founded as a nativist fraternity, following the Philadelphia nativist riots of the preceding spring and summer, in December 1844. The New York City anti-Irish, anti-German, anti-Catholic secret society the Order of the Star Spangled Banner was formed in 1848. Popularised nativist movements included the Know Nothing or American Party of the 1850s and the Immigration Restriction League of the 1890s. Nativism would eventually influence Congress; in 1924, legislation limiting immigration
from Southern and Eastern European countries was ratified, while
quantifying previous formal and informal anti-Asian previsions, such as
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907.
Modern usage
Statistical data
According to U.S. Census Bureau;
"Ancestry refers to a person's ethnic origin or descent, 'roots,' or
heritage, or the place of birth of the person or the person's parents or
ancestors before their arrival in the United States".
According to 2000 U.S census data, an increasing number of United States citizens identify simply as "American" on the question of ancestry.
The Census Bureau reports the number of people in the United States who
reported "American" and no other ancestry increased from 12.4 million
in 1990 to 20.2 million in 2000. This increase represents the largest numerical growth of any ethnic group in the United States during the 1990s.
In the 1980 census, 26% of United States residents cited that they were of English ancestry, making them the largest group at the time.
Slightly more than half of these individuals would cite that they were
of "American" ancestry on subsequent censuses when the option to do so
was made available, with areas where "American" ancestry predominates on
the 2000 census corresponding to places where "English" predominated on
the 1980 census.
In the 2000 United States Census, 6.9% of the American population chose to self-identify itself as having "American ancestry". The four states in which a plurality of the population reported American ancestry were Arkansas (15.7%), Kentucky (20.7%), Tennessee (17.3%), and West Virginia (18.7%). Sizable percentages of the populations of Alabama (16.8%), Mississippi (14.0%), North Carolina (13.7%), South Carolina (13.7%), Georgia (13.3%), and Indiana (11.8%) also reported American ancestry.
Map showing areas in red with high concentration of people who self-report as having "American" ancestry in 2000
In the Southern United States as a whole, 11.2% reported "American" ancestry, second only to African American. American was the fourth most common ancestry reported in the Midwest (6.5%) and West (4.1%). All Southern states except for Delaware, Maryland, Florida, and Texas reported 10% or more American, but outside the South, only Missouri
and Indiana did so. American was in the top five ancestries reported in
all Southern states except for Delaware, in four Midwestern states
bordering the South (Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, and Ohio) as well as Iowa, and six Northwestern states (Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming), but only one Northeastern state, Maine.
The pattern of areas with high levels of American is similar to that of
areas with high levels of not reporting any national ancestry.
In the 2014 American Community Survey, German Americans (14.4%), Irish Americans (10.4%), English Americans (7.6%) and Italian Americans (5.4%) were the four largest self-reported European ancestry groups in the United States, forming 37.8% of the total population. However, English, Scotch-Irish, and British American
demography is considered to be seriously undercounted, as the 6.9% of
U.S. Census respondents who self-report and identify simply as
"American" are primarily of these ancestries.
Academic analysis
Reynolds
Farley writes that "we may now be in an era of optional ethnicity, in
which no simple census question will distinguish those who identify
strongly with a specific European group from those who report symbolic
or imagined ethnicity."
Stanley Lieberson and Mary C. Waters
write: "As whites become increasingly distant in generations and time
from their immigrant ancestors, the tendency to distort, or remember
selectively, one's ethnic origins increases.... [E]thnic categories are
social phenomena that over the long run are constantly being redefined
and reformulated."
Mary C. Waters contends that white Americans of European origin are
afforded a wide range of choice: "In a sense, they are constantly given
an actual choice—they can either identify themselves with their ethnic
ancestry or they can 'melt' into the wider society and call themselves
American."
Professors Anthony Daniel Perez and Charles Hirschman write:
"European national origins are still common among whites—almost 3 of 5
whites name one or more European countries in response to the ancestry
question. ... However, a significant share of whites respond that they
are simply "American" or leave the ancestry question blank on their
census forms. Ethnicity is receding from the consciousness of many white
Americans. Because national origins do not count for very much in
contemporary America, many whites are content with a simplified
Americanized racial identity. The loss of specific ancestral attachments
among many white Americans also results from high patterns of
intermarriage and ethnic blending among whites of different European
stocks."
