Admit it: you think white people look most American

Katherine Kinzler, Professor of Psychology, University of Chicago.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, nationality tends to be defined by a set of legal parameters. This may involve birthplace, parental citizenship or procedures for naturalization.

Yet in many Americans’ minds these objective notions of citizenship are a little fuzzy, as social and developmental psychologists like me have documented. Psychologically, some people may just seem a little more American than others, based on factors such as race, ethnicity or language.

Reinforced by identity politics, this results in different ideas about who is welcome, who is tolerated and who is made to not feel welcome at all.

How race affects who belongs

Many people who explicitly endorse egalitarian ideals, such as the notion that all Americans are deserving of the rights of citizenship regardless of race, still implicitly harbor prejudices over who’s “really” American.

In a classic 2005 study, American adults across racial groups were fastest to associate the concept of “American” with white people. White, Black and Asian American adults were asked whether they endorse equality for all citizens. They were then presented with an implicit association test in which participants matched different faces with the categories “American” or “foreign.” They were told that every face was a U.S. citizen.

White and Asian participants responded most quickly in matching the white faces with “American,” even when they initially expressed egalitarian values. Black Americans implicitly saw Black and white faces as equally American — though they too implicitly viewed Asian faces as being less American.

Similarly, in a 2010 study, several groups of American adults implicitly considered British actress Kate Winslet to be more American than U.S.-born Lucy Liu — even though they were aware of their actual nationalities.

Importantly, the development of prejudice can even include feelings that disadvantage one’s own group. This can be seen when Asian Americans who took part in the studies found white faces to be more American than Asian faces. A related 2010 study found that Hispanic participants were also more likely to associate whiteness with “Americanness.”

Language and nationality

These biased views of nationality begin at a young age — and spoken language can often be a primary identifier of who is in which group, as I show in my book How You Say It.

Although the U.S. traditionally has not had a national language, many Americans feel that English is critical to being a “true American.” And the president recently released an executive order claiming to designate English as the official language.

In a 2017 study conducted by my research team and led by psychologist Jasmine DeJesus, we gave children a simple task: after viewing a series of faces that varied in skin color and listening to those people speak, children were asked to guess their nationality. The faces were either white- or Asian-looking and spoke either English or Korean. “Is this person American or Korean?” we asked.

We recruited three groups of children for the study: white American children who spoke only English, children in South Korea who spoke only Korean, and Korean American children who spoke both languages. The ages of the children were either 5-6 or 9-10.

The vast majority of the younger monolingual children identified nationality with language, describing English speakers as American and Korean speakers as Korean – even though both groups were divided equally between people who looked white or Asian.

As for the younger bilingual children, they had parents whose first language was Korean, not English, and who lived in the United States. Yet, just like the monolingual children, they thought that the English speakers, and not the Korean speakers, were the Americans.

As they age, however, children increasingly view racial characteristics as an integral part of nationality. By the age of 9, we found that children were considering the white English speakers to be the most American, compared with Korean speakers who looked white or English speakers who looked Asian.

Interestingly, this impact was more pronounced in the older children we recruited in South Korea.

Deep roots

So it seems that for children and adults alike, assessments of what it means to be American hinge on certain traits that have nothing to do with the actual legal requirements for citizenship. Neither whiteness nor fluency in English is a requirement to become American.

And this bias has consequences. Research has found that the degree to which people link whiteness with Americanness is related to their discriminatory behaviors in hiring or questioning others’ loyalty.

That we find these biases in children does not mean they are in any way absolute. We know that children begin to pick up on these types of biased cultural cues and values at a young age. It does mean, however, that these biases have deep roots in our psychology.

Understanding that biases exist may make it easier to correct them. So Americans celebrating the Fourth of July perhaps should ponder what it means to be an American — and whether social biases distort your beliefs about who belongs.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 2, 2020.