Americans without Americanness: The Racial Boundaries of U.S. National Membership

Scholars have proposed that racial stratification in the United States is informed by at least two axes: perceptions of superiority versus inferiority and beliefs about national inclusion versus exclusion. To date, however, research on the racial boundaries of U.S. national membership has yet to fully account for the multiple and correlated dimensions of Americanness, the perspectives of racial minorities, and the contrast between first-order beliefs (one’s own views) and third-order beliefs (perceptions of what most Americans think). I address these empirical and theoretical gaps with an original survey experiment ( N = 3,161) and uncover several key findings. First, Americans’ third-order beliefs structure national membership as a tripartite hierarchy that privileges Whites as most American, positions Latinos and Asians as least American, and locates Blacks in an intermediate position. Critically, this perceived national hierarchy persists even after accounting for characteristics such as immigrant generation status, language fluency, and civic engagement, suggesting that Americans hold essentialized conceptions of race and national belonging. At the same time, personal views often diverge from the ostensible societal consensus: only White Americans express first-order beliefs that mirror this tripartite hierarchy; Latino and Asian Americans reject their outsider status and instead claim an intermediate position, while Black Americans position themselves as more American than even Whites. I contend that these contested hierarchies of Americanness carry important implications for ongoing debates over immigrant assimilation, intergroup relations, and racial stratification in the United States.