{"id":4919,"date":"2016-07-30T21:02:14","date_gmt":"2016-07-31T03:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=4919"},"modified":"2016-07-30T21:17:09","modified_gmt":"2016-07-31T03:17:09","slug":"speaking-of-strange-hyphenizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2016\/07\/speaking-of-strange-hyphenizations.html","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of strange hyphenizations . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Yeah, this is more of an annoyance than anything, but I observed the other day<\/a> that \u201cAsian-American\u201d had become, in media stylebooks, a racial descriptor rather than an identification of an ethnicity (which it couldn\u2019t be, in so far as there is no one single \u201cAsian\u201d ethnicity).<\/p>\n

(To be clear: \u00a0the official Census racial label<\/a> is just \u201cAsian\u201d, which means,\u00a0\u201cA person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.\u201d \u00a0Note that the Middle East doesn\u2019t qualify: \u00a0Iranians and Iraqis are officially white.)<\/p>\n

Now there\u2019s a little CNN slideshow<\/a> that proves my point.<\/p>\n

It purports to be a listing of Asian-American actors, as a companion to a piece objecting to their underrepresentation<\/a> in the American film industry. \u00a0But here\u2019s there list (details from Wikipedia entries):<\/p>\n