If They’re American, Call Them Americans

Re “Marchers Remind World of 1915 Armenian Genocide,” April 20: The marchers were “14 young Armenians.” To be “young and Armenian,” said one of the marchers, is to grow up with a cultural wound, and so “Armenian groups” are lobbying Congress to pass a resolution. Only twice do you use the term “Armenian American,” and in neither instance is it clear that you’re referring to any of the people mentioned in the article. Yet I suspect that Caspar Jivalagian (the 18-year-old from Pasadena), Sanan Shirinian (the 16-year-old from La Crescenta), Serouj Aprahamian (the 23-year-old graduate of Cal Poly Pomona) and most of the people in the picture on page B1 are Americans of Armenian descent -- not “Armenians” but Armenian Americans.

My ancestors came from various parts of Russia and what was then Austria-Hungary, but if you wrote an article about me you would never refer to me as a Russian or an Austrio-Hungarian; you would refer to me as American because that is what I am. Why are these young marchers treated differently? More to the point, why do you feel it necessary to subdivide Americans at all?

Bob Haut

Topanga Canyon