“Hyphen killer”

“As a legacy, ‘hyphen killer’ is not bad,” said Henry Furhmann (1957–2022), a Los Angeles Times editor who pushed to end -American constructions.

Here is an obituary from the Times. And here is the essay that persuaded the editors of the AP Stylebook to drop the hyphen in 2019: “Drop the Hyphen in Asian American.” An excerpt:

To many of us in the trade and, more to the point, many of the people we write about, those hyphens serve to divide even as they are meant to connect. Their use in racial and ethnic identifiers can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American: part American, sure, but also something not American.

A related post
Hyphens in the news