Don't Hyphenate America

Like most of the world, I’ve been watching the Olympic games on television.  I had the chance to watch part of the games with my brother.  Regardless of the sport, if there was a US athlete in the competition, he watched it as if he’d been a fan all his life.  While watching the US men’s doubles team play the Korean team in badminton, someone commented that it was difficult to tell which team was which, given the US team members had Asian features.  My brother pointed out that it didn’t matter what they looked like, they were American and that’s all that matters.

I went to TeamUSA.org and found out that the US sent 530 athletes to the Games to compete in 25 of 26 sports (handball is the only sport in which the US doesn’t participate).  I also found out that Tony Gunawan, one of the badminton players, represented Indonesia in the 2000 Olympics before immigrating to the US, and Howard Bach, his team mate, was born in Vietnam.  As I browsed the list of names of the US athletes, I saw last names that clearly had origins in other countries, such as Iguodala, Ramirez, van Garderen, Wang, and Wozniak.  Like the US itself, the US Olympic team is a mixture of ethnicities and cultures, but American nonetheless.  That’s cool.

What really bothered me was the way the announcers and broadcasters often identified some US athletes as hyphenated Americans, e.g., African-American, Asian-Americans, etc., instead of simply referring to them as an American athlete.  None of the athletes from other countries were identified in a similar manner, as best I could tell. Why was it necessary to identify any American athlete as a hyphenated American?  It isn’t just the announcers at the Olympics that hyphenate America.  The media makes a point of specifying race when referring to those involved in an incident in the news or a political candidate running for office.  It is pervasive in our daily speech, but does it really matter where someone’s great-great grandfather was born?

I did an Internet search to see if this “hyphenization” occurred in other countries.  I didn’t find much beyond “French-Canadian” except for a couple of articles that referred to Dutch citizens of Chinese descent as “Dutch-Chinese” instead of “Chinese-Dutch”.  What I found even more interesting is that term “hyphenated American” has been around since the end of the 19^th century.

Evidently, calling someone a “hyphenated American” at the beginning of the 20^th century was akin to questioning their allegiance to the United States.  In fact, Theodore Roosevelt, in a 1915 speech given to the Knights of Columbus said:

“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... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”

President Woodrow Wilson, in a 1919 speech, said, “…any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”

I know that, in the interest of being politically correct, people use ”hyphenization” to denote ancestry.  But is it necessary to identify someone’s ancestry?  Why not simply say “American of Chinese descent” or “American of African descent” if the identification is that important?

I don’t want to imply that ancestry, culture, or heritage is unimportant.  Each ethnicity adds to the strength of this nation.  This country has always been the melting pot. Immigrants assimilate into American society while aspects of their culture become a part of the American culture.  It could be because my own heritage is an indistinguishable blend of nationalities that I only see myself as American.  Maybe because of that, I don’t see hyphenated Americans when I look at the people around me at work, at church or on TV.  I doubt the Olympians are competing for a hyphenated America.  The tally of medals lists those earned by US athletes. Period

Using hyphenated American labels implies that people are identified as Americans second.  It shouldn’t be that way.  As I wrote before, it doesn’t feel like the country is united anymore (http://active-thinker.blogspot.com/2012/06/united-independence-day.html).  There is already too much divisiveness in this country as it is. We are already a squabbling nation; do we really want to be a “tangle of squabbling nationalities” also?

As we cheer on our American athletes at the Games, let’s avoid the “hyphenated American” label and recognize that we are, first and foremost, Americans.