The Hyphenated-American Minefield
Maybe in these polarized, ethnically and racially fraught times, we should abandon hyphenations and just all call ourselves "Americans."
Kids like to ask each other, “Where were you born?” When they were in public school, my kids responded, “Africa.” Their rural small town classmates scoffed, “No you weren’t! You can’t be ‘cause you’re not Black!” Welcome to the thorny realm of ethnicity in America.
My kids were born to White parents in Cape Town, South Africa. Dad was a U.S. diplomat — but not posted to that country. It’s more complicated than that. Posted to Vietnam, we gave birth in South Africa because it was the home of my wife’s parents and it was on the State Department’s approved list of countries in which U.S. diplomats could deliver their babies. And it gets even more complicated. Mom and Oma and Opa were Dutch. The latter had emigrated to South Africa. They moved from Cape Town to deep inside Afrikaner territory in the West Cape. Hence, our kids’ first language was Afrikaans, reinforced during lengthy visits. Their story books and children’s ditties were in that language. Politically progressive, Opa and Oma nonetheless were very involved with preserving and promoting the Afrikaans language and associated culture. They called our kids, “klein boermeisies” — little boer girls.
Over the years, I joked, “You can actually call yourselves ‘African-Americans’ since you were born there. Why not?”
Columbia University linguist John McWhorter, himself a Black-American, doesn’t like the term at all. Weighing in on the New York City mayoral race, he writes in the New York Times,
I don’t think the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani did anything wrong when, as was reported last week, he checked off “Black or African American” on a college application. As a man of South Asian descent who spent the first part of his life living in Uganda, he was within his rights to call himself African American. The problem is that the term appeared on the application, or anywhere else. Plenty of Black people have never liked it, and ever more are joining the ranks. It’s time to let it go.
Well, that poses a quandary. For many decades, we Americans have hyphenated our ethnic identities, proudly proclaiming ourselves “Irish-American,” “Swedish-American,” “Japanese-American,” etc. But this applies mainly to those whose antecedents arrived post-Mayflower and post-Jamestown. Those millions of English descent are referred to as “WASP’s” — White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But not all. Those Marylanders who are descended from English Catholic refugees who settled there a few years after the arrival of the Mayflower in the early 1600’s aren’t technically WASP’s. They’re WASC’s, I guess — except that they don’t call themselves that. And folks don’t say they’re “WASP-American.” The Brits here have exempted themselves of hyphenation — except the Scots, Welsh, Cornish and Scots-Irish. And my Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) neighbors also aren’t given to hyphenation. Again, it’s complicated.
The vast majority of Americans of African descent arrived in the United States well before the Civil War, the first having been brought here in 1619. Four-hundred years in this country, they were identified for much of our history as “Negroes.” Eventually, this went out of fashion and they were referred to as “Colored,” regarded as a more polite form. “Black” eventually superseded this. Then, as McWhorter points out, “African-American” came into fashion in the 1980s. But he doesn’t like it. He prefers returning to the descriptive “Black” —
“African American” sounds like something on a form. Or something vaguely euphemistic, as if you’re trying to avoid saying something out loud. It feels less like a term for the vibrant, nuanced bustle of being a human than like seven chalky syllables bureaucratically impervious to abbreviation. Italian Americans call themselves “Italian” for short. Asian Americans are “Asian.” But for any number of reasons, it’s hard to imagine a great many Black Americans opting to call themselves simply African.
In my own case, my great-grandfather, an Italian immigrant, was born in 1846; he arrived with two of his children, also born in the 1800s. While Italian heritage has passed down, for me Italy is just another foreign country. I identify as “Italian” as much as my fellow WASP citizens whose ancestors arrived at Plymouth and Jamestown identify as “English.” We and our Black friends identify as “Americans,” pure and simple.
Which wise President Theodore Roosevelt, himself descended from Dutch migrants, fully grasped back in 1915:
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.
Maybe in these polarized, racially and ethnically fraught times, we’d be best to follow Teddy’s advice and simply all call ourselves “Americans.”