What are we without hyphens?

So this week my group process was about ethnic foods, but what stuck with me the most from this reading was a comment made on the melding of ethnic culture with that of the United States.

The reading basically said that you cannot grow an american soul if you maintain a hyphen in categorization of yourself. This is to say, to be african-american or hispanic-american or asian-american is not actually having the culture at its core. This seemed like an incredibly prejudice thing to say, though it was actually used as a counter point in the context of the reading it got me thinking about what it meant to be "distinctly" american. As we all assumed. There is no such thing.

What got me going was simply how you can break down each of the words. though each of those ethnicities are distinct the "latino, asian, or african" part of the word augments the word american. This is to say that these people are american first and whatever ethnicity second.

With this in mind its easy to see why we are categorized as the melting pot and how we are mixes of each group rather than distinctly one ethnicity or another. The etymology of the word shows us that what it means to be american is to take on other ethnicities in and make it our own.