“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”

The Guardian (29 January 1992)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate." by Toni Morrison?

Toni Morrison184

American writer 1931–2019

Related quotes

“In this country we have no place for hyphenated Americans.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

“It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen”

Frank McCourt book 'Tis

§14
'Tis (2000)
Source: ' Tis: a Memoir
Context: Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they're Irish and we should all have a drink? It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen.

“I want to be an American — without the hyphen.”

Pauli Murray (1910–1985) American writer, activist and lawyer

[Sadler, Betty, She Refuses To Leave Leadership To "Spoilers', The State, 10 November 1967, Columbia, SC, 3−B]

“We were never hyphenated as Arab-Americans. We were American, and I have always rejected the hyphen and I believe all assimilated immigrants should not be designated ethnically. Or separated, of course, by race, or creed either. These are trends that ever try to divide us as a people.”

Helen Thomas (1920–2013) American author and journalist

As quoted in America: what my country means to me by 150 Americans from all walks of life http://books.google.com/?id=h4qpzo7yNxEC&pg=PA238&dq=tripoli+%22helen+thomas%22&q=tripoli%20%22helen%20thomas%22My (2002), Simon & Schuster, p. 238.

“For an American citizen to vote as a German-American, an Irish-American, or an English-American, is to be a traitor to American institutions; and those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)

“The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: 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, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.