HYPHENATED AMERICANS

 Some white folks are complaing that they can't celebrate being "white" matters the same way "black" matters. Well for starters the only group of white folks that don't celebrate just being white are the English Americans. And if we can trace that part of our heritage back far enough we're likely to go back to the county great grandpa about seven times removed came from.

In my case Yorkshire. The west riding to be exact. York was it's own kingdom a long time ago during the Danish occupation of that part of England. The one thing I thing remarkable is that once that long lost Norman ancestor got there the family stayed there. For five hundred years. Probably married a Saxon. And the County of York was so big it was split into three sections or ridings. An old Viking word. And looking at the map. Yorkshire is just a little more than half the size of Wales.

And if your name was too long, had too many syllables that nobody could rightly pronounce, your English was passable and your accent not too pronounced you move someplace else and lose that first half of that hyphenated description and change your name. Especially back when paper work wasn't so organized and small towns didn't care too much about the details.

Anyway we've got Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Scots, Germans, Finns,Hungarians, Serbians, Poles, Armenians, Greeks, Russians. A real alphabet soup of hypenated citizens. And I have traced on little branch back to Armenia. A very long time ago. I am a walking, talking, union of hyphens.

Even Native Americans have a good idea where at least part of their ancestry comes from. Lakota, Cheyenne, Cree, Cherokee, Mohawk, Yakima, Umatilla. They are rediscovering their roots and not all of them ever lost them in spite of the electied hired help's best efforts to wipe them off the face of the earth.

Now the descendants of the Africans kidnapped and sold into the West Indies and the American colonies and southern states don't have those options. Can't change your skin color. Even worse you don't know which part of west Africa your ancestors came from or what tribe they were part of. There are no Yoruba Amercans, Igbo Americans, Fulani, Ashanti, Hausa, Kongo. At least most folks call them African Americans now. But Africa is a continent, not a country. Although it seems that more than a few of my fellow Americans flunked basic geography.

And as for last names. Slaves didn't have any. The names they were born with were stolen from them. I remember a scene from Roots where Kunta Kinte becamce Toby, if I remember correctly. And if I remember correctly, whipped until he answered to it. And in Stephen Foster's song we hear about Old Black Joe.

 So how did slaves get surnames. Some took or were given the last names of an owner. I suppose some were given the last name of their white fathers. After the civil war some took the last name of Freeman or Freedman. Maybe the job they were good at a Wheeler or a Carter.

 I sincerely hope that some African Americans that share one of my family names were given it because they were owned by my first cousins a few times removed, or they chose it, not because they are family. I would be proud to call them family, but not proud lf how they may have bocome family.

So some of us Scots Irish English Welsh German Americans would do well to remember that some other folks can't call themselves Yoruba Igbo Ashanti Americans. At least not without some pretty fancy DNA testing.