The American nation in the late work of Samuel Huntington. The culture paradigm and the denial of race and ethnicity in the building of contemporary American nation-state

Abstract

this article´s purpose is to understand how the handling of a specific discourse about the American nation, more specifically the one produced by American political scientist Samuel Huntington, creates concrete political effects that negatively impact ethnic minority groups in the USA. According to the author, the "Uncle Sam's nation" has transformed into a non-ethnic society in which the ethnic-racial component has vanished from national identity. With Trump in power, Huntington's ideas manage to merge with the American nation-state and become the new political and social norm, challenging theories which associate the American nation with its ethnic and cultural heterogeneity. As a result, ethnic minorities that decide to participate in the country's political life, asserting their status as "American citizens," are now guilty and criminalized for "bringing back" the problem of race and racism to the United States.