XXX

Balancing National and Ethnic Identities:

The Psychology of E Pluribus Unum

Jack Citrin

University of California, Berkeley

David O. Sears

University of California, Los Angeles

Introduction[1]

In a challenge to the ongoing American experiment of reconciling unity and diversity, Ernest Gellner (1983) called a multi-ethnic nation-state an oxymoron, arguing that minority groups ultimately would have to assimilate or secede. Using history to assess the validity of Gellner’s claim that cultural unity is necessary for sustaining a sense of common national identity is difficult, however, given the slipperiness of key terms such as “culture” and “nation.” Does culture refer just to a common language or to a thicker layer of common understandings and, if so, just how thick? And does a sense of national identity mean an emotional attachment to one’s homeland and everyone living there or a more bounded sense of solidarity with only those who share one’s physical characteristics or cultural norms?

Despite the problems with testing Gellner’s proposition, its contemporary relevance is obvious. Indeed, globalization and migration-driven multiculturalism are twin threats to Gellnerian nationalism and its institutional expression, the sovereign state. In the United States, ethnic identities have become more salient due to immigration, religious sectarianism, the development of linguistic enclaves, and the ideology of multiculturalism. At the same time, as the aftermath of September 11 shows, patriotic feelings continue to run very high (Huntington 2004).

One policy for achieving unity in the face of cultural diversity is forced assimilation, as with the aggressive “Americanization” program aimed at the immigrants of the early twentieth century. Another is to enshrine publicly a dominant national culture, but leave minority groups alone; France has tended to follow this approach. A third solution, followed by the United States for at least part of its recent history (Walzer 1997), is to proclaim no single ethnic or religious preference as the nation’s defining identity, but simply to demand as a price of nationhood that everyone endorses democratic political principles and tolerates everyone else’s customs. A final approach is to elevate the value of difference, going beyond simply accepting diversity to strengthening it through government policies. In multicultural nationalism, there is virtually nothing on the unum side of the scale of identities.

In a democracy, the choice among these policies—the meaning of one’s national identity—depends in part on the attitudes of citizens who must also balance the claims of unity and diversity. At the individual level, this dilemma entails the accommodation of multiple identities, or, more specifically, the negotiation of identity claims deriving from membership in both an overarching national group and a more restricted ethnic group. This chapter uses survey data to describe how Americans order their national and ethnic identities, to investigate the factors giving rise to different modes of structuring, and to track the influence of strong national and ethnic identifications, respectively, on several public policies. The substantive goal is to investigate when national and ethnic identities should be viewed as competing or complementary. The methodological goal is to improve the conceptualization and measurement of American national identity.

Defining Identity

As the introductory chapter to this volume shows, the voluminous academic literature on “identity” resembles a quagmire rather than a tunnel ending in conceptual clarity. Since the term is used to mean both sameness and difference, both commonality and individuality, this should not be surprising. Still, the drawing power of “identity” makes it unlikely that the suggestion to consign it to the dustbin of scientific history will take hold (Brubaker and Cooper 2000), so the best one can do is to stipulate a definition that helps address the dominant theoretical and empirical issues concerning “identity politics.” And although definitions of “identity” abound, there is a surprising consensus about the nature of these questions. Below we outline the main points of agreement:

1. National and ethnic identities are social identities. By this it is meant that they refer to dimensions of one’s self-concept defined by perceptions of similarity with some and difference from others. Social identities develop because people perceive themselves as belonging to groups and pursue their goals through membership in these groups. Social identities arise from a process of social comparison and their formation inevitably requires drawing boundaries between “us” and “them.” Hence, one’s social identity, the aspect of the self shared with others, is defined by who one is or, sometimes, by the boundaries drawn by others. In Sartre’s famous comment: anti-Semitism assures that Jews (and a Jewish identity) will endure. So one important question with implications for group conflict is whether there is agreement about the boundaries of group membership. The assimilated German Jews thought of themselves in national rather than ethnic terms; the Nazis viewed things differently.

2. Politics can be critical in the “social construction” of group identities. Nation-building is a process of inclusion and exclusion, and political decisions reflecting the balance of power among contending groups boundaries and determine their permeability. The answer to the question “Who is an American?” has changed over the country’s history. Lind (1995) refers to the first American nation as Anglo-Protestant, the second as European and Christian, and the third post-World War II as, finally, cosmopolitan and multi-racial. Rogers Smith (1997) has documented how immigration and naturalization laws have embodied these competing definitions of nationhood and established a racial hierarchy. The U.S. Census has also played a part in demarcating group identities. In the nineteenth century, the “one drop of blood” rule was used to limit the mobility and power of blacks. More recently, however, black activists have sought to use that rule to increase the official size of their ethnic group as part of the competition for government benefits allocated on ethnic grounds. More generally, politics constrains identity choice and provides incentives for the maintenance and intensification of particular group identifications.

3. In defining social identities, it is critical to distinguish their cognitive, affective, and normative dimensions (Citrin, Wong, and Duff 2001; Brewer 2000; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). The act of self-categorization answers the cognitive, “who am I?” question, but the strength of one’s identification with a particular membership group—the emotional significance of a social identity—varies. One can call oneself an American without feeling strongly patriotic or believing that nationality is fundamental to one’s self-concept. Identifying as is not the same as identifying with. The motivational basis for strongly identifying with a group is the individual’s need for a positive sense of self-esteem, which seemingly derives in part from the worth accorded to one’s group.

4. The normative content of a social identity refers to the accepted criteria for group membership; that is, ideas about the appearance, values, and conduct of the prototypical member of the group. The famous question, “What does it mean to be an American?” is asking about the normative content of national identity in the United States. The bases on which collective judgments of sameness or difference rest can vary across time and space (Horowitz 1985). In other words, the content of national identity can be contested as well as constructed. Content and contestation are the two dimensions of collective identity isolated in the introductory chapter, and contestation focuses on the content of a collective identity rather than on the facts of group boundaries or the meaning of identification. In the American case, there is a debate over whether popular attitudes and public policy have conceived of the nation in inclusionary, cosmopolitan terms or in ethnocultural terms privileging members of particular racial and cultural groups. Assessing the competing claims on this point presents formidable methodological problems.

5. Social identities have political relevance because they channel feelings of mutuality, obligation, and antagonism, delineating the contours of one’s willingness to help other people and the boundaries of support for policies allocating resources based on group membership. Indeed, the intimate connection between the personal and the social bases of self-regard becomes clear when one recalls how quickly an insult to the dignity of one’s group can trigger ethnic violence (Horowitz 1985). Identities can be a matter of life and death. In the name of the nation, ethnic group, or religion, people are both willing to die for “our people” and to commit unspeakable crimes against the dehumanized “others.” More generally, identity politics refers to the mobilization of group pride to advance perceived collective group interests, calling upon people to judge events, policies, and candidates primarily in terms of how they would affect the standing and heritage of one’s group. In the study of group conflict, the politicization of identities is an important research question.

6. The connection between group identity and political cohesion is a major focus of inquiry. One leading hypothesis is that social identities are more likely to influence behavior as they acquire emotional significance (Tajfel 1981). A strong sense of identity is hypothesized to engender a willingness to conform to and defend group norms.

7. In modern society, individuals belong to several, usually overlapping groups, including national, regional, ethnic, and professional groups. Hence, the familiar assertion that individuals have multiple identities based on contrasting themselves with varied sets of “others” (Sen 2000; Brewer and Roccas 2001). The number, nature, and relative significance of these varied social identities change with life circumstances and political events. The existence of multiple identities raises the problem of prioritization. That is, when confronting a political choice, which of one’s several memberships and identifications ultimately governs one’s actions? The particular relationship examined in this paper is the subjective balance between nationality and ethnicity in the United States.

Identity Choice: Nation or Ethnic Group?

Nationalists insist on the priority of identity with the nation over all other foci of affiliation. Along these lines, the British politician Norman Tebbitt proposed the “cricket test” for national identity. He proclaimed that the failure of British citizens of South Asian or West Indian origin to cheer for the English team when it played India, Pakistan, or Jamaica meant that their strongest identification was with their country of origin and not their physical and political home. Linda Chavez echoed this sentiment when Latino fans rooted for Mexico and booed the American national anthem at an international soccer match in Los Angeles. More recently, Samuel Huntington (2004) predicts that the ongoing pattern of Mexican immigration into the United States will fragment the nation by eroding the cultural unity underlying its sense of common identity and purpose.

In rebuttal, Amartya Sen (2000) argued that the “fan’s test,” does not prove that nationality and ethnicity were competing identities; one could root for the Pakistani cricket team and still fulfill all the responsibilities of citizenship. The same holds true for the African-American tennis fan supporting Serena Williams when she plays fellow-American Jennifer Capriati. If Sen is correct, then nationality and ethnicity do not always compete. Put another way, context helps determine the salience of group identities and their relevance for behavior. Yet there are occasions when these loyalties do tug in opposite directions. After Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans faced a choice between loyalty to their new country and support for their country of origin. Overwhelmingly, and despite internment by their own government, they demonstrated the primacy of their American national identity .

In a multi-ethnic society like the United States, the individual’s national and ethnic identities do not completely overlap; Americans share membership in the overarching national group with people from ethnic “out-groups.” Brewer and Roccas (2001: 5-10) introduce the concept of “social identity complexity” to represent the coexistence of these multiple group memberships and outline four alternative ways for an individual to reconcile the tensions that may emanate from this circumstance. Their typology is a useful theoretical foundation for hypotheses about how national and ethnic identities interact to shape political choices, so we describe it here in some detail. Of particular significance is what each mode of ordering one’s multiple identities implies for the inclusion or exclusion of others from what David Hollinger (1995) evocatively calls the “Circle of We.”

Dominance is the strategy of subordinating all potential group identities to one primary attachment. Nationalists insist that one’s American identity take precedence; indeed, we shall see that most whites define themselves as “just” Americans and eschew ethnic labels even when pressed. From the perspective of immigrants, assimilating to the host country at the expense of their original ethnic heritage is one variant of the dominance model. Exclusive identification with one’s ethnic origins and separation from the mainstream culture is another. Identity politics evokes a version of the dominance strategy-- its persistent motif judges all political decisions in terms of their impact on one’s primary “in-group.”

Compartmentalization is a solution in which the particular identity activated depends on the situation. Another way of characterizing this approach is that the individual’s primary identity is domain-specific. According to Horowitz (1975: 118), all ascriptive identities are “heavily contextual.” In Europe, I call myself an American; in Boston, I am a Californian. Children of immigrants may speak their parent’s native language at home, but English at school or work. Sometimes only one social identity is evoked by a situation; for example, local elections and environmental policies rarely activate nationalist sentiments. Yet there are contexts in which more than one kind of self-categorization is relevant and when choice is inevitable; in spying for Israel, Jonathan Pollard chose between his Zionist and American identities.

Intersection is a third mode of reconciling multiple identities. In a multi-ethnic society, this involves the formation of a “blended bicultural identity.” The definition of one’s in-group thus becomes those who share both ethnic heritage and residence in the host country (Brewer and Roccas 2001: 13). The preferred self-representation is the hyphenated identity of African-American, Mexican-American, or Italian-American These terms imply more than the mere addition or concomitance of two group memberships; rather, this mode of identification intimates the existence of a unique configuration of interests derived from the specific experiences of particular ethnic groups in the American context (Brewer and Roccas 2001: 13).