In 2019, the AP Stylebook changed its recommendations from using hyphens in dual heritage terms like African American and Asian American to not using hyphens. Recently the influential copy editor from the Los Angeles Times who advocated for the change, Henry Fuhrmann, died soon after a cancer diagnosis at age 65, which led to some great retrospectives on his work. So in this week's Grammar Girl episode, Mignon is talking about the influence of his work.

Henry campaigned for the hyphenation change in newsrooms across America, and the AP Stylebook credited  a 2018 essay he wrote for The Conscious Style Guide with influencing their decision to make the change.

Early in his essay, Henry noted that the hyphen was long considered a logical tool for showing dual heritage when relevant, but made a strong case based on the history of hyphenation and grammatical usage that it would be better and more accurate to leave it out. Here’s part of his argument in his own words:

“Those 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. [The phrase] “ hyphenated Americans” is one derogatory result of such usage.”

He explained how, historically, the hyphen could imply dual loyalties, as in the hyphenated “Japanese-American” form during World War II. 

He quoted Eric Liu, a former speechwriter in the Clinton White House, who wrote, “Chinese is one adjective. I am many kinds of American, after all: a politically active American, a short American, an earnest American, an educated American. This is not a quibble about grammar; it’s a claim about the very act of claiming this country.”

And Henry also highlighted comments from the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, an American writer of Chinese descent who separately expressed very similar sentiments and favored getting rid of the hyphen. In that context, she also wrote, “I am an American writer, who, like other American writers, wants to write the great American novel.”

And finally, Henry also noted that nobody hyphenates “French Canadian.”

So Henry was not at all alone in his belief that our language is better when we omit the hyphen from terms such as “Asian American,” “African American,” and “Italian American,” but like the wonderful writer and editor he was, he skillfully brought together the argument in a way that was so convincing that he changed the rules. Today, if you’re following AP style, the Chicago Manual of Style, New York Times style, or even Buzzfeed style, you write these terms without the hyphen. Listen to the full episode here, and read atranscript here.

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