by Dan Keizer

Created on: January 05, 2009

In a nation of immigrants, why should ancestry put people into separate categories? Why are some people simply Americans, while others are referred to as African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans or Asian-Americans? I think American society would be much better off if we were a nation without hyphens.

The nomenclature given to various races is can be confusing. Is an African-American somebody who has come to the States from an African nation, or can it apply to anybody who is black even if their ancestry is not African? Am I allowed to call people from Eastern Russia Asian-Americans, or does that term only apply to people with slanty eyes?

My father is from Amsterdam, but nobody has ever called me a Dutch-American. I've never been to the Netherlands and you wouldn't know I was Dutch unless I told you. You can't even call my dad a Dutch-American because he's not a citizen here, but he has lived here longer than many Americans have been alive. Minority nomenclature sure leads to a lot of conundrums.

There are a dozen reasons why minority nomenclature in America doesn't work or is impractical. The root of all these problems is that no category is correct for every individual. All of society, whether born American or immigrant, is made up of individuals. Each person has a different background, a different story, and a different ancestry. In America, there is only one category that can correctly apply to every citizen: American.

When you ask if minority Americans can simply be referred to as simply Americans, you are asking to broaden the criteria that makes you American. You are asking mainstream society to admit that there are other Americans besides white people. It seems like a pretty big deal for Americans to recognize that minorities aren't just here on a sightseeing tour, they live here and are a huge part of our culture.

I wonder if the person that invented the hyphenated terms for minority Americans was hoping to keep them classified seperately in hopes that they would live seperately from the once-predominate Western European Americans. Some people envision a group like Hispanic-Americans as a people that just arrived from Mexico, rather than a woman who works with them at the office whose ancestors immigrated from El Salvador four generations ago.

It is going to be hard for some people to come to grips with the fact that everyone around them is a unique individual, and that no matter how different they may seem they are just as much an American as anybody else. But when race or ancestry stops becoming a factor when we think of who our peers are, America will become a better place.

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