HYPHENED-NATION

by Nicole Draffen

Overview

Hyphened-Nation was inspired by my travels overseas, and time spent living in the United Kingdom. Living abroad was an eye opening experience, I grew to understand certain aspects of American culture better, the longer I lived overseas. This book is about my insights, and experience of being treated as a pure American, rather than as a hyphenated one. The difference was startling, and lead me on a journey to understand why The United States is one of the only, if not the only country, that hyphenates its citizens by ethnicity before nationality. Those same boxes we allow ourselves to be placed into as hyphenated-Americans, limit our economic, educational, societal and cultural growth. This book focuses on ways the U.S. and Europe differ culturally via media, and how a bridge might be created. I hope this book inspires you to join the movement and, "Don't Check the Box". Be a catalyst for positive change. Your stories and insights will help to light everyone's path to a brighter future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780997488180
Publisher:	Nicole Broadwater
Publication date:	06/04/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	279 KB

Editorial Reviews

2023-07-20
Draffen calls for Americans to drop their ethnic labels in this impassioned anti-racist manifesto.

The author, who grew up in California and is of African, French, Scottish, and Indigenous American ancestry, recounts an epiphany she experienced in 2009 during a yearlong sojourn in Great Britain, where the locals paid no attention to her ethnicity and treated her as a generic American. Draffen asserts that the lack of racism was so bracing (she cites television programming full of casually interracial couples) that she “felt [her] spirit soaring freely.” That revelation sparked her critique of the United States’ entrenched racial categorizations, evinced in hyphenated ethnic self-designations like African-American, Mexican-American and Pakistani-American (she acknowledges AP style rules now call for eliminating hyphens in these cases, observing, “That’s great, but even without the hyphen, the term remains. As does the label”). Draffen sees such identifiers as sources of division—classifications with costs (enabling bias and exclusion) outweighing their benefits in cementing group solidarity. The author traces the hyphen’s history, from its roots in the Constitution to Theodore Roosevelt’s celebrated speech against hyphenated identities to modern-day racial ideologues who insist that minorities wear their ethnic backgrounds on their sleeves. Along the way, she targets many sacred cows, attacking the acceptance of non-standard Black dialect in schools and suggesting that Black History Month be cancelled and its contents folded into year-round American history. While Draffen opposes rigid racial self-identifications, she is not naïve about America’s claims of color-blindness; she writes plangently of her childhood sense of not belonging in a white-dominated society, and skewers Hollywood’s stereotyping of minorities as impoverished, strung-out criminals. The author’s argument features shrewd social analysis written in elegant, witty prose—in race-obsessed America, she writes, white people “either judge me immediately based on racial perceptions or go out of their way to make sure I know they aren’t judging me. They just have to mention they have black friends or make sure to drop Aretha Franklin or John Legend’s name in the conversation.” Her text is a fresh, incisive take on how we can transcend our racial discontents.

A stimulating call for racial minorities to reject ghettoization.

Kirkus Reviews