asian american - pt 2

Conscious Style Guide - Drop the Hyphen in Asian American

when I was a kid, I played around with Asian American or American Asian, and for some time I classified myself as American Asian, because I felt American first. my parents, not having been born or raised here, were Asian American.

I don't remember thinking much about the hyphen tho. I think agree with Maxine Hong Kingston, that “I have been thinking that we ought to leave out the hyphen in ‘Chinese-American,’ because the hyphen gives the word on either side equal weight, as if linking two nouns. …Without the hyphen, ‘Chinese’ is an adjective and ‘American’ a noun; a Chinese American is a type of American." this runs parallel to the idea I had about Asian American vs American Asian. 

in the comments where I found the above article linked, someone said that "Asian Americans are Asian migrants who now have American citizenship, and so, they're in the same category as African migrants who now have American citizenship, and therefore are African Americans. There's therefore a distinction between African Americans and Black Americans." which is true! white Charlize Theron was born in South African and is now American. she is fully African American, tho not Black. and Rhianna is part Black and was born in Barbados, not Africa (tho her mom is Afro-Guyanese), so she's not African American. but then, what are people like me? I guess the rather wordy: American of Asian descent, because I don't think we'll ever be referred to as yellow Americans (nor should we be!).

p.s.
we SHOULD start using white American a lot more, or at least until we stop using race as a common identifier. otherwise, American will always default to being a white person.