We are all these things and more.
As the cultural critic Albert Murray wrote in his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans, the essence of American life is that it relentlessly generates hybrids. American culture takes segments of DNA-genetic and cultural-from around the planet and re-splices them into something previously unimagined. The sum of this-the Omni-is as capacious as human life itself, yet found in America most fully. This is jazz and the blues. This is the mash-up. This is everything creole, mestizo, hapa. In its serious forms, multiculturalism never asserted that every racial group should have its own sealed and separate history or that each group’s history war equally salient to the formation of the American experience. It simply claimed that the Omni-American story-of diversity and hybridity-was the legitimate American story.