The aim of this paper is to redefine the concepts of “ethnicity” and “race” within the national context of the United States, by employing a relational approach. “Ethnicity” in the U.S. has been conceptualized in two opposite theoretical traditions : cultural pluralism and multiculturalism. To sharpen the multiculturalist critique of the ethnicity theory in the post-civil rights era, the “racial formation” theory conceptualizes race as a social construct and examines the reproduction of inequalities among racialized groups. However, the theory contains ambiguities concerning the conceptual relationship between ethnicity and race, and disregards the influences of nationalism upon such formation.
This paper proposes “ethno-racial formation” as a framework modified to take account of various forms of nationalisms affecting ethnic group formation. First, it focuses on American nationalism, which has been divided into the contradictory traditions of civic and racial nationalisms. Second, even if the definitions of group boundary and cohesion depend on the idea of the “homeland, ” ethno-racial formation in the post-civil rights era has its basis in the civic nationalist tradition of the U.S. Finally, there are two different, but simultaneous, processes related to group formation in the U.S. : (1) ethnicization : a differentiation at the horizontal level based on actual and /or virtual ties with homelands, and (2) racialization : a differentiation at the hierarchical level ruled by racial nationalism in the U.S.