hyphenated american

At my high school newspaper, I learned that when you use "Asian American" as a noun, there's no hyphen (I see many Asian Americans), but when you use it as an adjective, we insert the hyphen (This is an Asian-American value.).

I was reading over one of Cyrus's papers, and I thought I'd found a typo when I saw a blank space between "Asian" and "American" being used as an adjective. "You need a hyphen here!" I said. But it turns out that things have changed since high school. It turns out that the standard usage takes out the hyphen altogether because the hyphenated adjective connotes a time when "hyphenated Americans" were considered a lower status compared to just Americans.

Have you ever heard that term before? "Hyphenated American?" I haven't, and I guess that's why I never thought twice about the previous rule.

So, Asian Americans, remember that when writing a paper about, say, the Asian American identity or Asian American immigrant history...no hyphen!