On terminology: USA! USA!
On the 250th anniversary of the country’s beginning, it is worth puzzling over what to call ourselves. “US American” is commonly used by progressive academics to make the point that everyone in North and South America is an American, and so a farmer in Iowa is no more American than one in Brazil, Haiti, or Mexico. But it’s not that simple.
This is a valid point intellectually, but does it work stylistically? I double-checked to see what the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press, and the American Studies Association had to say. It turns out that none of the three likes the term “US American.” The CMOS prefers Americans, but the ASA likes terms like “citizens of the United States,” which is itself not unproblematic, because so many people of color lacked the ability to exercise civil rights as citizens for most of this country’s history. “Residents of the United States” is another workaround, but not all residents of the U.S. are U.S. Americans.
It gets worse: the ASA prefers U.S. as an adjective rather than American, and United States versus America, while CMOS prefers American and America, relying on context to distinguish between the country and the two continents. Again, it’s the writer’s choice.
They also clash on US vs U.S. CMOS prefers US, but the ASA prefers U.S. with the periods.
Both agree that when using the US as a noun, it is always spelled out as United States and preceded by “a” rather than “an” because even though it is a vowel, the “U” is pronounced with a hard sound, not a soft one.
I would say that even if one follows ASA style and uses U.S. rather than America/American in most contexts, the word American should, of course, be retained in racial/ethnic identity: African American, Black American, Asian American, Japanese American, and white American. It also belongs in adjectives that wouldn’t work otherwise, such as Americanized, anti-American, un-American, and all-American. It should also be kept in common two-word phrases, like American exceptionalism, the American Revolution, and the American South.
The Associated Press is the most ecumenical of the three and allows both U.S. and American as both adjectives and nouns, unless the context makes it unclear if the word American refers to citizens of the United States or other residents of North and South America. The AP uses US without periods to save space in headlines, but U.S. in the body of a story. CMOS likes no periods, and ASA prefers periods. Frankly, I think most readers are more comfortable with the use of periods in U.S., no matter what CMOS says.
Ultimately, following ASA , CMOS, or AP comes down to a choice of audiences. Progressive academics would prefer ASA style, and everyone else would prefer CMOS or AP. The AP is the least rigid of the three and essentially accepts all comers.
Given that I believe that academics should seek to attract, or at least not alienate, readers outside the academy, I would recommend following CMOS in most cases, while also throwing in some uses of U.S. as an adjective and United States vs. America, as AP style allows. If referring to affairs of state, use U.S.; when referring to people, events, or culture, use American: the U.S. war effort vs. American novelists. But even then, it is preferable to switch it up if you have a lot of references in the same paragraph, so that you don’t end up repeating the same word in close succession.
Finally, although it may be inconsistent and so frowned upon by copyeditors, I think a few well-placed “U.S. Americans” are appropriate, to provoke awareness of the inexactness of the term American. If one wanted to, one might even footnote the phrase and explain the different valences of each variation. But ultimately, using “U.S. American” too often feels awkward and even dogmatic.
So, would an American by any other name smell as sweet? That is a question for an entirely different field of inquiry.
