ABSTRACT
What does it mean to be a member of the dominant group? My claimed ancestry is English American or “Yankee” (in the sense of a multigenerational inhabitant of New England). For many in my ethnic group, the strongest identity is simply “American.” As Stanley Lieberson (1985) discovered in an analysis of US Census data, white Protestant Americans whose families have lived in the United States for many generations are most likely to self-identify as just “American.” Indeed, as I will discuss later, the ability to claim “American” identity is an important marker of dominant-group status. More recently, since the 1950s, the label “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) has often been applied to my group, reflecting the assimilation of other European ethnic groups into the Anglo-American core and the broadening of group boundaries (Glazer & Moynihan, 1963: 15). Whatever the label, the important point is, as John Myers (2003: 44) has put it, that “the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant group is the quintessential dominant group in our society.”
