LOS ANGELES — No one had really paid too much attention to the hyphen. In matters of race and heritage — as in "African-Americans" or "Italian-Americans" — it was easily overlooked, an innocuous piece of punctuation that seemed to make sense.
Henry Fuhrmann thought otherwise. Journalist and self-described word nerd, Fuhrmann saw in the simple construction an unnecessary and derogative diminution of American identities and understood that no battle was too small in the fight for clarity, precision and fairness.
"Those hyphens," he wrote in a 2019 essay, "serve to divide even as they are meant to connect. Their use in racial and ethnic identities can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American."
