The two traditions

There are two traditions of nationalism in America. One is what I call civic nationalism, and the other is what I call racial nationalism.

Civic nationalism portrays America as a society open to all comers, irrespective of race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexuality. Within this framework, America welcomes people from all over the world. Their only obligation is to obey the law, work hard, try and get ahead and live their lives without adversely affecting the lives of others. It's a profoundly diverse and democratic commitment that America has made, opening itself to the people of the world. And many Americans feel this civic tradition intensely.

Americans celebrate July 4th, Independence Day. Photo by FamVeld.

The other tradition, racial nationalism, stands in sharp contradiction to the first. It says that to be a full-fledged American, one needs certain qualities of ancestry, race, ethnicity and perhaps religion. From this point of view, the preferred Americans are white Protestants. These immigrants come primarily from Europe, and they imagine that America was meant to be a society of European descent. Insofar as immigrants are admitted to America, these white Protestants are given preference, and their descendants are preferred in terms of rising in American society. From this perspective, America imagines itself as a racial nation, privileging certain races, religions and ethnicities over others. And the most important privileging is that of race. From the perspective of this racial nationalist tradition, you must be white. If you're not white, you struggle to have rights in American society in ways that whites do not have to contend with.

What to do with a society that has two principles of nationalism that stand in such sharp contradiction to each other? It renders America a paradoxical place: on the one hand, open and welcoming; on the other, closed and discriminatory. And America is always working through the contrary impulses of its two traditions of nationalism, civic and racial.

Big country, small population

At its beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the United States was a big land with much economic potential and too few people to develop it. America needed immigrants. Between the 1820s and 1920s, an estimated 35 million people came to the United States. They came into a society that in 1900 numbered only 76 million. Think of those numbers: 35 million over a century coming into a society that at the end of that century numbered only about 100 million. Now you begin to appreciate the immigrant density in American life.

There were no prohibitions on who could come. There was, however, a prohibition on who could become a citizen. The first citizenship law of the United States, passed by the first Congress in 1790, said that you had to be free and white to become a citizen of the United States. This was clearly meant to exclude Africans and people of African descent. After the Civil War, when African Americans were allowed to become citizens, this becomes directed mostly at immigrants of Asian descent, especially South and East Asia: Indians, Japanese and Chinese. And this law remained on the books until 1952. In other words, from 1790 to 1952, for three-quarters of the history of the United States, America's primary citizenship law said that to be a citizen of the United States, you had to be free and white. It's hard to imagine the aspiration to be a white nation being more clearly ascribed into law.

The birthright citizenship paradox

As a result of the Civil War, in which the North defeated the Confederacy’s slave states, there was an amendment passed to the Constitution that said any person born on the soil of the United States is a citizen of the United States. It doesn't matter where you come from, who your parents are, whether you're rich or poor, white or another colour. If you're born on the soil of the United States, you are a citizen of the United States. This is the affirmation of the civic nationalist tradition.

The United States is saying, on the one hand, that only someone who is white can become a citizen of the United States. But it's also saying that anyone born on the soil of the United States is a citizen upon birth. This is called birthright citizenship. America is one of the few societies in the world to have it.

New American citizens at Independence Day Naturalisation Ceremony on July 4, 2005 at Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photo by Joseph Som.

Think of what this means if you are the child of an immigrant group barred from becoming citizens, as Chinese and Japanese were for a long time. By virtue of this amendment to the Constitution, your children are citizens of the United States upon birth. So, even within families, you have the contradiction of racial nationalism versus civic nationalism. The parents were barred on account of race from becoming citizens, while their children automatically became citizens through birth. It’s a very dramatic manifestation of the paradox of these two nationalist traditions and the instability they inject into American life.

Inflection points and counter-revolutions

There have been multiple waves of immigration to the United States. When a wave has gotten really large, as it did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and as it has again today, disputes arise about what America is and what it is meant to be.

Long-settled Americans tend to be from groups distinct from the immigrants who are coming in. Those long-settled groups regard the new immigrants as a threat, and as they become more and more numerous, they begin to say, as long as we let these newcomers in, I’m not sure we can trust their loyalty. I'm not sure they care enough about democratic practices. Maybe we have to shut them out or pass laws that will prevent them from entering the most important aspects of American life. Perhaps we need to keep them on the margins? Maybe we need to stop them from coming altogether?

These are moments, in other words, when a gap opens up between the image that long-settled groups of Americans have of their society and what their society begins to look like on a daily basis. And in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, those who are unsettled by immigration tended to be Protestant or old immigrants from the British Isles, Germany and Scandinavia. They saw their society filling up with Eastern and Southern Europeans, Poles, Eastern European Jews, Slavs, Greeks and Italians. And they began to say, this is not our America. It's not Protestant – it's Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish. We can't survive in this way.

There are battles and inflection points. And there are moments when America undergoes a counter-revolution of sorts against these immigrants to try and either shut them out or shut them down. This happened in the 1920s, and it is happening again in America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Two presidents, two visions

Now, the split is not between northwest Europe and southeastern Europe. The split is between those Americans who trace their ancestry to Europe and those immigrants who trace their ancestry to Latin America, Africa and Asia.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Former U.S. President Barack Obama wait to exit the east front steps for the departure ceremony during the 58th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

America is on its way to becoming a majority-minority nation. By that, I mean that soon, most Americans will be part of what are considered minority groups in America. This majority will be a majority that is not of European descent. Many Americans, including many Trump supporters, say America will no longer be America if that happens. Trump represents the older America that wants to turn back the tide of immigration.

Obama, during his presidency, represented the new America. Obama's message was an important one because it's what I think has prevailed throughout American history. Obama's message was: do you think that because I don't look like you, I can't discharge the laws? Do you think I can't be loyal to America? Do you think I won't be faithful to the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence? Well, let me tell you, I will be the best kind of American.

This has happened again and again throughout American history. Those thought to be inferior and incapable of understanding what was most precious about American life – its democratic inheritance, the Constitution, respect for individual liberty, respect for individualism, respect for the American way of life – have demonstrated that if they are allowed to participate, they are a source of richness in American life and a source of support for the democratic inheritance that so many Americans hold dear. Therefore, I am optimistic about a future in which the Obama vision will ultimately triumph over the Trump vision. But these are long struggles that go on for decades, and they are bitterly fought.

The hope of Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter is one of these mass movements that arise every 50 to 70 years to address the legacies of slavery squarely. To try yet again to uproot the racial nationalist tradition and to put America on a less contradictory and less paradoxical foundation.

Like their predecessors in the civil rights movement of 70 years ago and the abolition movement of 170 years ago, the hope of Black Lives Matter is that the racism that has emerged and lingers from slavery can finally be abolished.

The only thing one can say for sure is that this will not be the last battle. But Black Lives Matter takes its place as a very important moment and movement in a long history of struggle to put America in a position to rectify racial wrongs and implant racial equality as a foundational element of American life.

Discover more about

civic and racial nationalism

Gerstle, G. (2016). Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present. Princeton University Press.

Gerstle, G. (2017). American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton University Press.

Gerstle, G. (2014). Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Making of American Nationality. In R. H. Bayor (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity (pp. 144–165). Oxford Handbooks Online.

The foundations of American nationalism