The British ``Rebranding'' Brouhaha

Hyphenated ethnicity is a badge of honor in America (remember that successful push to rebrand black people as ``African-Americans''?). But the idea is not going over well in the United Kingdom.

Home Office Minister Hazel Blears proposed to recategorize ethnic and religious human kinds by adding a U.S.-style suffix to official labels -- so that, for example, Pakistanis would become ``Pakistani British.'' The concept's many critics seem to feel that it would create a lower-caste form of British identity. That's exactly the opposite of the U.S. p.o.v., which is that a human-kind label without that extra word ``American'' at the end is a sort of pariah status. Over here, the hyphen indicates inclusion. An ``Italian'' is a furriner from Old Europe; an Italian-American is one of Us.

For instance, when former Governor Jim McGreevey of New Jersey announced that he was a ``gay American,'' his language was carefully chosen to play to our love of the hyphen. As David Kocieniewski reported in the Aug. 15, 2004 New York Times, the term came from the Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay-rights lobbying outfit, ``and was a poll-tested phrase used to reframe the debate about gay causes from one about sexual liberation to one about civil rights.''

For Americans, the hyphen means inclusion. For the Brits, apparently, it means the opposite. That's an illustration of Erving Goffman's observation about identity: Its meaning depends on context. The nose piercing that is stigmatized at the office may be the height of cool at the rave. So too the hyphenation of ethnic labels can be treasured in one English-speaking nation and derided in another. Not a problem, unless you believe that identity is fixed, inherent and essential -- therefore that hyphenation must be A Good Thing or A Bad Thing. It's both. It's neither. It depends where you are. That's what I conclude from the curious fact that we are two peoples separated by a common hyphen.