The War of Hyphens

American vs. Hyphenated-American: What the Labels Really Mean

In everyday American speech, people introduce themselves in different ways. Some say “I’m American.” Others say “I’m Irish-American,” “African-American,” “Mexican-American,” or any of dozens of hyphenated variations. These are not just stylistic choices, they signal different understandings of identity, history, loyalty, and belonging. The distinction matters more than most people admit.

When someone from the United States calls themselves simply “American” (with no prefix or hyphen), they are usually making a deliberate statement:

Primary identity is national, not ethnic or ancestral. Their core allegiance and self-conception is tied to the United States as a civic nation, not to an older country, tribe, or ethnic group elsewhere. They reject perpetual foreignness. The term implicitly pushes back against the idea that certain citizens remain forever tied to another homeland. It says, “I am not a guest, a sojourner, or a member of a diaspora—I am a full and unqualified member of this political community.”

From the Founding era through the great waves of European immigration (1880–1924), the default expectation was that immigrants and their children would drop old-country identifiers over time. A grandson of Sicilian or Polish immigrants was simply “American” by the third generation at latest. The melting-pot ideal—e pluribus unum—assumed ethnic particularism would fade into a shared American identity.

In its purest form, calling oneself “American” (no hyphen) aligns with the classical liberal view that citizenship, rights, and identity flow from shared commitment to the Constitution, the English language, and a common civic culture—not from blood, religion, or ancestry.

This is why you almost never hear recent immigrants from Europe or Asia say “I’m American” on day one. They usually wait until they feel fully assimilated, or until their children or grandchildren do. When they finally drop the hyphen, it is celebrated as the completion of the American story.

The hyphen, by contrast, keeps two loyalties in tension. Dual identity is permanent and valued. The one who speaks it wants to preserve a meaningful connection—cultural, historical, or emotional—to an ancestral homeland or racial/ethnic experience while still claiming American citizenship. But are they American? If they never acknowledge the idea of assimilation?

The hyphen often reflects the belief that full assimilation either never happened or is undesirable. For African-Americans, the hyphen historically recognized that their ancestors did not come voluntarily and were denied full membership for centuries. For many post-1965 immigrants and their children, it signals pride in heritage and resistance to pressure to “act white” or erase their roots.

Hyphenated identities are useful for organizing and dividing politically, celebrating distinct differences, and maintaining institutions (language schools, festivals, media, places of worship) tied to the old country or racial experience.

In progressive usage especially, the hyphen suggests that “plain American” has historically meant “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant” and that claiming a hyphen is a way of challenging that monopoly on the term. That debate is as old as the country itself.

Theodore Roosevelt (1915) famously thundered: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… 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.”

Woodrow Wilson told a group of newly naturalized citizens the same year that any man who carries a hyphen “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic.”

Yet the hyphen persisted and even grew stronger in the late 20th century. The rise of multiculturalism after the 1960s, the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 (which reopened mass immigration from non-European sources), and the institutionalization of identity politics all made the hyphen not just acceptable but almost mandatory in elite discourse. Further dividing Americans from a shared experience and identity.

Surveys consistently show a generational and ideological split. Older Americans, whites, and conservatives are far more likely to prefer “American” with no hyphen. Younger Americans, non-whites, and progressives overwhelmingly favor hyphenated or racial/ethnic identifiers (“Black,” “Latino,” “Asian-American,” etc.). Immigrants themselves often drop the hyphen faster than their American-born children do—an irony not lost on critics of multiculturalism.

So what does it mean? To call yourself simply “American” is to place the national civic community above every other affiliation and to accept the older assimilationist bargain: we can keep our private traditions, but in public we meet on common ground as one people.

To call yourself “hyphenated-American” is to insist that the older bargain either never applied to your group or is no longer desirable—that duality or multiplicity is a permanently dividing feature of American life.

For anyone who understands the founding of this nation, the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, we realize that this nation is made up of and for We The People ... Not We The Groups. For the people. Of the people. By the people. One people. Americans.

So, when someone says “we,” no one should have to ask which "we" they mean.