In elementary school it was called the "melting pot," the heterogeneous ingredients of cultures, races and religions becoming homogeneous.
In high school it was called the "salad bowl," the juxtaposition of various cultures into a mosaic like a salad, as opposed to the more prolific notion of the melting pot.
In science, it's called diffusion, an instantaneous and effective mixture of unlike gases in a closed container.
Andrei Codrescu calls this the age of the hybrids in America, people made of flesh and wired to iPods, GPS devices and the Internet, just like their cars. America has always been a place of mixed nations of peoples and differences for centuries. Codrescu claims "the hybrid reality has always been a part of us." Artists mix paint and newspapers for collage, sculptors combine steel and foam, mixed-race Creoles create jazz in New Orleans, one of the most American of all arts. Artists, he says, have made obvious what everyone knows: there isn't a single human being or any living thing that isn't a combination of things.
There are no pure races, nations or tribes. Zeus is a psychedelic quilt composed of earlier gods; we are all mutations of what once was. No one is purely anything, rather mutts, combinations of races, nations and tribes of past. Better and stronger than before. Our hyphenated identities are common-language labels that identify us to one another, each our own particular brand of ethnic mix, accepting the idea that we have more in common than what separates us.
Within the next 15 years, the U.S. Census projects that more than half of all children in the U.S. will be minorities. Everyone has a story about being part of this shifting culture, about being preached that the world is a salad bowl rather than melting pot, pockets of races scattered across the landscape. Still, we've found that rather than promoting unity, these pockets promote fear with labels, and degradation. That rather than lower our fences, we build walls.
Living in a multi-cultural city like San Francisco affords us the opportunity to experience all kinds of cultural events, dine at hundreds of restaurants with distinct and different cuisines, and work side by side with people who consider you American first, immigrant second.
Now America has a hybrid, black and white leader, ready to drive us hybrids of the 21st century to new sources of energy, inspiration and accomplishment. Lets see what kind of wonderful we can create together... Hopefully our children's generation will shift enough to know how merge these hybrid colors, instead of keep them separate.