American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

Morrison is critiquing how “American” often functions as an unmarked synonym for whiteness in U.S. culture, while Black people are treated as needing qualifiers to claim national belonging. The “hyphen after hyphen” points to the pressure to adopt labels like “African-American,” “Black-American,” and other compounded identities to be legible as both ethnic and American—an asymmetry that reveals who is assumed to be the default citizen. The line also implies that language is not neutral: naming practices encode power, deciding whose identity is considered standard and whose is perpetually “other.” In Morrison’s broader critical work, this connects to how U.S. literature and ideology have been shaped by racialized assumptions even when race is not explicitly discussed.