The Kings College student Patrick Seaworth shows why the teaching of real American history is important.

In an essay for The College Fix, Seaworth reviews the prescient words of President Theodore Roosevelt.

A century ago, hyphenated Americanism was a slur, an epithet, an insult – a means of denigrating immigrants.

President Theodore Roosevelt, in a 1915 speech to the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic fraternal organization founded by an Irish priest to care for “Irish-Americans” during a stage in American history not far removed from the formation of an anti-Immigrant party, The Know-Nothing Party), stated: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. … The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

Teddy Roosevelt’s dire warning has unfortunately come to pass; the very embodiment of the mischief of factions, noted by President James Madison within Federalist No. 10, our government was meant to overcome, and yet so embraced and promoted by the Democrat Party.

Today Hyphenated Americanism is worn as a badge of honor by many, a distinction of sorts that separates Americans by skin pigmentation. Our sole identity as Americans has been divided into racial categories, creating a system in which White is American, and all other races are, and always will be, immigrants to this great nation.

…Like Teddy Roosevelt predicated, hyphenated Americanism is ruining this country.Being an American has nothing to do with what color your skin is, it has nothing to do with where your ancestors are from, it has nothing to do with where you were raised. You are either American, or you are not American.

Hyphens are a societal loophole that perpetuate the notion that America is run by old white men who are native to this country, but not its land. Hyphens feed into the notion that America is a country of racial divides, of racist undertones, and facades of acceptance.

If things have gone too far askew to correct, then perhaps we are looking at the wrong place to discover the roots of this acrimony and the way to equalize it. If the addition of the word American to forms is a fix, we have a duty to allow Americans of all races to declare themselves as race.

…Those who cling to their hyphenated status should join hand in hand with those who bare no hyphens and realize the dreams of Martin Luther King, Jr., putting behind the notions of a man or woman born in this country, or who were lawful immigrants, as anything other than simply American.