in defense of hyphens

notes on grammar and identity

A cartoon from 1899 depicting immigrants as “hyphenated Americans” with split loyalties between the United States and their countries of origin [Source: Re-Imagining Migration]

On the evening of October 12, 1915, former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt took the stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall to deliver an address to 2,500 members of the Knights of Columbus’ New York chapter. In his speech, which he gave on the topic of “Americanism,” Roosevelt directly addressed the question of immigrant communities’ patriotism, arguing that immigrants, if they did not wish to be branded as traitors, had a responsibility to completely and unquestioningly shed any foreign loyalties in favor of a patriotic American identity. “There is no room in this country,” he infamously proclaimed, “for hyphenated Americanism.” A few months later, in May 1916, Roosevelt delivered another speech, this one entitled “America for Americans,” in St. Louis, in which he once again condemned “hyphenated Americanism” as a threat to national unity and denounced the use of the hyphen as an “effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself…[and] to breed a spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens.”

Roosevelt delivered these speeches during the peak of European immigration to the United States, at a time when the patriotic loyalty of immigrant communities—particularly Irish, Germans, and Italians—was increasingly being called into question. A few years later, then-President Woodrow Wilson echoed Roosevelt’s sentiments in his famous “Pueblo speech,” declaring before a crowd of 10,000 that “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.”

In their calls for immigrants to adopt Americanism as their sole national and political identity, both Roosevelt and Wilson invoked a trope that had been used in media and political discourse since at least the 1890s—that of the “hyphenated American.” For Roosevelt, Wilson, and others who capitalized upon paranoid public sentiments to dabble in anti-immigrant fearmongering, the use of a hyphen in terms such as “Italian-American” and “German-American” carried a significance that went far beyond the grammatical, denoting not only dual heritage but dual loyalty as well.

---

The use of the hyphen to describe immigrant and minority groups has long been the cause of considerable controversy, due in no small part to its checkered history in the rhetoric surrounding American immigration politics, and in recent years many institutions have moved to drop the hyphen altogether. At the 2019 annual conference of ACES: The Society for Editing, the lead editor of The Associated Press Stylebook announced that the updated edition of the stylebook would eliminate the hyphen’s use in “expressions denoting dual heritage.” The decision cited the advocacy of longtime Los Angeles Times editor Henry Fuhrmann, who wrote in one essay that “hyphens serve to divide even as they are meant to connect. Their use in racial and ethnic identifiers can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American: part American, sure, but also something not American.”

While the AP Stylebook was among the first major media institutions to eliminate the hyphen, other journalistic giants have since followed suit. In 2021, the New York Times quietly dropped the hyphen in its own style guide—a decision that was commended by the Asian American Journalists Association, and which apparently came in response to a letter sent by the Association for Asian American Studies which described the hyphen’s elimination as “an additional step toward recognizing…the dignity and humanity of Asian Americans.”

In 2003, following the demise of A Magazine—once a leading pop culture publication geared towards Asian America—a group of writers and artists in the San Francisco Bay Area founded Hyphen, with the aim of filling the need for “a publication about Asian America that would go beyond Lucy Liu, sushi and yet another examination of the ‘model minority’ story.” The magazine takes its name from the debates surrounding the eponymous punctuation mark—debates which, its editors write, “reflect the dynamism and complexity that define today's Asian America.” (It should be noted that the magazine does not stay neutral in these debates—the FAQ page on its website states that “we do not hyphenate Asian American, or any other ethnic minority,” explaining that “without the hyphen, Asian American is comparable to young American, or liberal American — it provides extra and optional information about this American. With the hyphen, the ‘Asian’ part becomes a necessary component, as if Asian-Americans are a different set of people from Americans: a contiguous but non-overlapping set in the Venn diagram.”)

As the above-mentioned note from the editors of Hyphen indicates, arguments against including hyphens in expressions of dual heritage often tend to center around the idea that the hyphen’s use constitutes a form of grammatical Othering, that hyphenating the identity of a given subject marks that subject as not being a “true” American. According to this line of thinking, by rejecting the hyphen, immigrant communities whose patriotic loyalty is so frequently called into question can send the message, loud and clear, that we are Americans, too. To a certain extent, this logic is hard to argue with—given the alarming resurgence of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, spurred on (though certainly not started) by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the rise of a chauvinistic American identity politics that is increasingly defined on the terms of white Christian nationalism, it makes sense that immigrant and minority communities would feel compelled, now more than ever before, to assert their status as full and equal Americans.

That said, I am not altogether convinced that dropping the hyphen in the name of emphasizing our Americanness necessarily has the intended political effect. It is, after all, worth bearing in mind that the historical use of “hyphenated Americans” as a pejorative by the likes of Roosevelt and Wilson has always been rooted in the deeply prejudiced expectation that, in order to be viewed with anything other than hatred and suspicion, immigrants must shed all hallmarks of their own culture and heritage in favor of an unadulterated, unqualified American identity—hence Roosevelt’s assertion in his Carnegie Hall speech that “the only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.” Such an expectation sees any attempt by immigrants to hold on to the “foreign” facets of our identity—whether through the languages we speak, the cultural practices we engage in, or the terms we use to refer to ourselves—not only as an unacceptable refusal to assimilate, but as an existential threat to the very concept of Americanness itself.

Ultimately, while calls to drop the hyphen may be well-intentioned, it is also true that the line of argument advanced by the punctuation mark’s many critics—namely, that hyphenating the identity of immigrants somehow undermines our status as equal Americans—plays into this same xenophobic logic, implying that our American identity is somehow more important or valuable than any other identities we may hold. To call myself an “Indian American,” sans hyphen, is to assert while my experience of Americanness may be influenced in some way by my Indian roots, at the end of the day I am an American first and foremost. In this formulation, “American” is the noun that describes my identity, while “Indian” is the adjective that qualifies the noun.

To call myself an “Indian-American,” on the other hand, is to place these two identities on an equal footing, sending the message that I am both of these things at once and in equal measure. While it does not reject Americanness outright, the hyphenated label, unlike its non-hyphenated counterpart, maintains the noun status of both identities, refusing to subordinate one to the other. Viewed through this lens, the hyphen thus becomes an assertion of pride and agency rather than a marker of difference, an oppositional instrument rather than an Othering one.

In his seminal essay “What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?,” first published in 1992, the Jamaican-born British sociologist and activist Stuart Hall wrote that

“blacks in the British diaspora must, at this historical moment, refuse the binary black or British. They must refuse it because the ‘or’ remains the sight of constant contestation when the aim of the struggle must be, instead, to replace the ‘or’ with the potentiality or the possibility of an ‘and.’ That is the logic of coupling rather than the logic of a binary opposition. You can be black and British, not only because that is a necessary position to take in 1992, but also because even those two terms, joined now by the coupler ‘and’ instead of opposed to one another, do not exhaust all of our identities.”

Though Hall was of course writing about the experience of the black diaspora in Britain, his words are no less applicable to immigrant politics in the United States. The argument could certainly be made that for so-called “hyphenated Americans,” the hyphen dividing their dual identities can and should function in an analogous manner to Hall’s “and”—as a marker of potentiality that follows a “logic of coupling rather than the logic of a binary opposition.”

---

My childhood, like that of most young people growing up in a post-9/11 America, was defined in large part by a ceaseless, cultlike indoctrination into the customs and credo of American patriotism. American flags, it seemed, were everywhere—hanging on the porches of my neighbor’s houses, affixed as decals to the rear windows of cars, flashing across television screens alongside promises of bargain prices on sofas and mattresses. Each morning in elementary school, immediately following our daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, our teacher would choose a patriotic song or two for the class to sing together, a dozen reedy voices warbling in off-key unison about the majesty of purple mountains in the land of the pilgrims’ pride.

When I was around ten years old, following months of pestering, my parents finally allowed me to join the Boy Scouts of America. Thanks in no small part to the additional battery of patriotic evangelism that I encountered during my brief time in that organization, the many hues of red, white, and blue that already flowed through my veins only grew more intense. When my fifth-grade teacher assigned classroom jobs to each student—watering the plants on the windowsill, feeding the class fish, etc.—I jumped at the opportunity to be the student entrusted with hoisting the flag each morning on the pole outside the school building, a responsibility I viewed with all the dire gravity of a clandestine military operation.

Though patriotism was certainly foisted upon me from all directions, it would be a lie to say that I did not willingly accept its imposition. On the contrary, I wanted nothing more than to be seen as American, to be accepted by my lily-white peers as one of their compatriots, and as far as I was concerned, the endless stream of flag-waving propaganda that constantly came at me from all directions was an invitation to do exactly that. Any trappings of my Indian heritage—the color of my skin, the food my family ate at home, the multisyllabic unpronounceability of my name—were of secondary importance, mere footnotes to the fact of my total and unqualified Americanness. At times, they even appeared to me as obstacles to my assimilation, shameful markers of difference that must be hidden (or at least downplayed) at all costs. In the process of adopting this newfound patriotism, one might say that I dropped the figurative hyphen, reducing my Indianness to the status of mere adjective as I subordinated it to my Americanness—though of course, at my tender age I was far from mature enough to think of my identity in such formal terms.

The predictable result of all this was a prolonged estrangement from my roots, the manifestations of which ranged from passive alienation to outright rejection. It took several years, in addition to the development during my teenage years of a radical political consciousness which turned an increasingly critical eye on the very idea of Americanness, before I was able to regain some level of comfort with my non-American background. (This process is, of course, far from complete—I have yet to learn my mother tongue, the names and dates of religious festivals still run together in my mind, and try as I might, I remain unable to shake my preference for eating rice and dal with a spoon rather than with my fingers.)

Though their intentions are noble, I worry that the logic of those who clamor for the hyphen’s elimination in the name of asserting our status as Americans may perhaps resemble too closely the logic which motivated me, and so many other second-generation immigrant kids like me, to shun our roots in favor of embracing the stars and stripes. Perhaps, rather than abandoning the hyphen on the grounds of its problematic history, we would do better to recognize the mark’s potential, in Stuart Hall’s words, to replace the “logic of binary opposition” with a “logic of coupling,” to “replace the ‘or’ with the potentiality or the possibility of an ‘and.’ Instead of subordinating one identity to another, there may in fact be more to be gained from placing our American identities on an equal footing with their supposedly “foreign” counterparts, proudly wearing the hyphen as a badge of honor rather than of Otherness.

Contrary to what the non-hyphenated version of my nationality might suggest, I am not an American who happens to have some Indian heritage. I am an Indian and I am an American, and my Indianness is every bit as important to who I am as my Americanness is—a fact which can only be fully captured by hyphenating my identity. A century ago, the worst thing an immigrant in the United States could do was to be a “hyphenated American.” Today, that is exactly what I am, and I could not be prouder of it.

---

no more mangoes is a reader-supported publication. If you know someone who might be interested in subscribing, please take a moment to share the link!