The “Heritage Americans” Concept: Who Does It Include–and Exclude?

by Timothy Kirchoff

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The term “heritage American” has come into use in certain parts of the internet—in blogs, on X, and in hand-wringing commentary from outlets like Politico. While definitions of the term vary, it seems to mean roughly “Americans who trace their presence in the country back to the colonial or Civil War era.” The term is endorsed by some as a celebration of the United States’ “national heritage and its culture.” 

When I first heard the term “heritage American,” I thought back to my experience as a long-term substitute teacher for middle schoolers in my home town. 

My home town has gradually become more and more Hispanic over the course of my lifetime. The city and its schools had been built by and for Bohemian immigrants a century before, and as more recent waves of Central and South American immigrants moved westward out of Chicago, my home town became a natural destination. In short, I was tasked with teaching a room of some two dozen fifth-graders, all but one or two of whom were Hispanic, about the American Revolution.

The textbook and prepared lesson plans were easy enough to navigate, and my own time studying American history (both in school and recreationally) served me well. Nevertheless, the experience still challenged me to reflect on what it means for the descendants of recent immigrants to take on an identity as Americans, and especially how that sense of identity integrates the parts of the American story that pre-date the arrival of their ancestors to this part of the continent. 

These questions had no easy answers. At the time, though, the musical Hamilton was still new enough in the public consciousness that several of the children could quote lines from it as readily as they quoted Avengers: Infinity War (whether they were an appropriate age for either piece of content is, as anyone who deals with middle schoolers knows, irrelevant to their level of familiarity with said content).

Hamilton was not just a well-packaged depiction of the American Revolution and its Founding Fathers with contemporary music. It was an attempt to make the Revolution relatable (what an awful cliché) to people of color and more recent immigrants by centering the story of an abolitionist immigrant. And, at the time, it worked: knowing the stories of figures such as Alexander Hamilton helped my students and others feel more personally connected to and emotionally invested in the American story at its earliest stages. 

Given the power of this kind of personal connection, I can sympathize with the apparent desire of self-identified “heritage Americans” to strengthen their sense of American identity by tracing their family histories back toward the Civil War period, if not the Founding. The American story of universal liberty is deeply intertwined with the stories of ordinary Americans and families, and understanding exactly where and how your own family’s history connects with the American story can be a source of healthy patriotic pride as well as personal identity. People don’t need to look for themselves in Alexander Hamilton’s ideals or personal background as an immigrant if they can already trace their ancestry back to either the leading Founders or the ordinary American colonists in whom the promises of liberty first took root. 

Ken Burns has been very forthcoming about one of the major points he hopes to make with his recent documentary series The American Revolution: that the American Revolution was the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ because of the new understanding of political freedom it reflected. The documentary itself gives more texture to this claim: what might have been only a provincial revolt within an empire became a turning point in global history specifically because the leaders of that revolt framed their actions in the context of universal claims about human liberty. 

It is only because the wealthy landowners’ universal claims about liberty appealed to ordinary people that those ordinary people were willing to fight and die in the Revolution. By braiding their personal interests together with the cause of universal liberty, the Founders were able to draw others in—like adding new strands to a rope that grows thicker and stronger as each new thread is intertwined.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution may have been largely written and signed by the land-owning and slave-owning descendants of Englishmen, but, per Burns's account, independence was fought for largely by more ordinary people—including former slaves and their descendants—who saw the potential of the ideal of liberty, even if only for themselves. Even if the cynics are right that the Founders were seeking to preserve their own privileges, they could not have succeeded in doing so without also having offered liberty to the everyday people who would work, sweat, fight, bleed, and die in the war. 

The neighborhood where I taught middle school was one of the areas ICE focused their activity during “Operation Midway Blitz” in the Chicago area. I don’t know how many of my former students still live in the area. I don’t know whether any of them, their families, or relatives were detained or just harassed by ICE agents. To the extent that any of them were directly affected by ICE activity, I don’t know, and am not in a position to judge, how they will feel about that experience or about how these governmental actions—purportedly in the name of the American people—reflect on their own self-identification as Americans, or whether they still see value in the identification with the American project that Hamilton facilitated.

It is possible for people across the world to embrace the ideals of liberty without considering themselves American, but the reverse is not true: we cannot disentangle the American story from the story of universal liberty—at least, not without mangling and disfiguring it. The proposition that it is “self-evident” that “all men are created equal” cannot be coherently followed by “especially my descendants.” 

But that kind of incoherence has also been part of the American story from the beginning. Jefferson, who wrote that all men are equal, owned slaves. Many colonists were eager to settle past the Appalachians—explicitly at the expense of indigenous groups—partly out of economic ambition and partly because the ability to vote and therefore participate in government was tied to land ownership until the 1820s or later. George Washington, meanwhile, had one portion of his tremendous wealth in slaves and another portion in land speculation out west. 

American prosperity, from the very beginning, involved the exploitation or dispossession of non-white people. We cannot tell the American story without discussing liberty, but ambition, empire, and racism have also been bound up in the American story from the beginning.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the typical online advocate of the label “heritage American” risks embracing the wrong side of that tension. Rather than seeing and valuing individual Americans’ continuing role in advancing the ideals that made the American Revolution a historical turning point, they seem to be trying to focus on white Americans’ role in advancing the interests of white Americans. In other words, “heritage American” as it is often invoked is a thin disguise for white nationalism or Christian nationalism. 

I can’t discount the respective roles of outsourcing and of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in leading to a temptation toward an illiberal mindset, even as I regard the mindset as reprehensible. With factories being closed down by the owners in favor of cheaper foreign labor, it is easy to see why communities that once had good reason to see themselves as having an important role in America’s economic strength might feel abandoned. In addition, these communities saw an entire generation sign up to fight in—and come back bearing physical and psychological scars from—wars on the far side of the world that ultimately did little to further their supposed goal of spreading democracy. 

Ultimately, I am not in a position to tell such people how they ought to feel about the overall American project after being exploited and abandoned by our nation’s economic and political leaders, with all of this maltreatment supposedly being in the service of expanding liberty and prosperity worldwide. I can see how these experiences might lead them to question the ideals that were used to justify abandoning them. 

But when I remember my former students or my current Spanish-speaking neighbors and co-parishioners, I know that embracing racism, nativism, and mass deportations will do nothing to solve America’s problems either economically or morally. A definition of American that excludes my neighbors is not one that I care to apply to myself.

One useful litmus test for any variation on the "heritage American" narrative may be the way the experiences of African-Americans are integrated: are the centuries of maltreatment papered over and minimized, or is their constant struggle for equality acknowledged and celebrated? Similarly, does the heritage American make room to mourn the fact that this continent's indigenous population has been variously destroyed, dispossessed, and relegated to poverty, or is their condition shrugged off as being their own fault? Or to put the point more harshly, do they say that Native Americans, like recently unemployed coal miners, should stop mourning a lost way of life and just 'learn to code'?

At this point, the term "heritage American" does not have a fully settled cultural or political meaning. It may ultimately serve—and there is good reason to believe it is intended as—little more than another euphemism for white nationalism, but it could be a useful way of re-engaging American people with the entire story of America, with all its glories and failings. 

The most defensible definition of a heritage American is someone who both embraces and wrestles with their heritage as an American, someone who sees themselves and their family— both past and future—as being inextricably connected to specific American communities and America as a country. It must include particular stories—but not to the exclusion of the foundational proposition about universal liberty. 

My home town was built a century ago by and for first- and second-generation immigrants. Today, an increasing proportion of its residents are first- and second-generation immigrants from another part of the world. Now, ICE has taken it upon itself to decide who does and doesn't belong on the streets where I grew up. 

I don't know whether or to what degree this experience will strengthen my home town's commitment to America as an ideal, or whether it will undermine its faith in our federal government's commitment to that ideal.  However, I'm doing my best to work toward the first possibility. It's not just my patriotic duty as an American, but, as someone whose last name is inherited directly from a Union veteran, something of a family tradition as well.