I got to thinking about how there are very few or, at most, a tiny group of pure Americans – you know, the ones without a hyphen separating an antecedent.  I do not think of myself as a veteran-American, or owning 3 degrees – American, or as a Jewish- American.  I do know that “other” Americans think about “Black-Americans as not quite American enough.  This works the same way if you think about Red-Neck- Americans or Democratic- Americans or Republican -Americans. In all of these instances you can turn them around and, IF YOU MUST, think of them as Americans who happen to have some other name attached to their identification. Americans who happen to be “Black” aren’t slaves anymore.

Then there is the ethnicity thing. We have “White”, “Olive-skinned”, Asiatic and African Americans.  “American Indians” were here first but not Americans until the mapmakers adopted the first name of Vespucci to indicate this continent.

You don’t get the same reaction among certain groups when you talk about Americans who happen to be Christian (but, which group do you mean?) That is a tough one.  I think that some Americans who happen to be Protestant think about other Americans who happen to be Catholic and not in a favorable way. The reverse might or must be true. Religious wars marred the history of Europe for hundreds of years. That hatred pointed to differences justifying killing each other.

It is getting to the point where we have to deal with newcomers to America.  The first newcomers were the groups who were here when European –Americans reached these shores. They, those who fled religious persecution, found “Indians” who were not from India but who had names like Blackfoot, Iroquois, and Seminole and further west, Flatheads, Nez-Perce, and Apache and so on.  But, there was no hyphenation here.  The Europeans became Americans and labeled others who followed after their national origins: Italian-Americans, German-Americans, French-Americans, Dutch and Swedish-Americans.  As room in the East filled up the newcomers went west and there were Norwegian-Americans, Swedish-Americans and any other group who wanted land and most of these paid no attention to the original peoples who were already established in freeholds they had owned for a long time.  They had histories of warfare and peace and satisfied themselves with the food there was at hand. These, thinking they are Americans look in askance at newcomers who are Muslims.

All of the above is prelude to the notion of a relative newcomer, one half of whom is possibly Kenyan-American.  I think it would be best and proper to think of him as an American who is half Kenyan – the other half pure European-American. Then we can get to the religious designation.  He is wholly Christian-American but there are questions about, not the affiliation, but the Pastor with whom he identified or was identified with by others.  Was his Kenyan father Muslim? I think so.  But could he then be identified as half-white, half Kenyan, Christian but not of the religion of his father? Things get sticky when you go that far into hyphenation, but why would you want to? People do and the silliness of wasteful thought and prejudice is filled with distrust and hate enough to kill and start the whole process all over again. You would think we were intelligent and educated enough to see this and get it behind us.