Obama and the global melting pot

Americans, to some extent, and the rest of the world, to a great extent, could use more knowledge of our how multicultural and multiethnic and multiracial most of the world is and has been for a very long time. No one who lives in Hawaii, where the definition of family has been expanded to its greatest and most loving extent, will be surprised to hear, as I did this weekend, that residents of the Obama clan in Africa consider the new American president to be family and extend to him the same warm feelings they would to a relative who lived in the next village. Since Obama has lived in Hawaii he will have no trouble appreciating this. Reporters covering the inaugural noted that Obama chose to use his full middle name in taking the oath, and interpreted this as a subtle message to the Arab world that America wasn't necessarily so different as might be thought. Certainly it will be good for all sides for the world to have a deeper understanding of the American melting pot, the full details of which are not entirely known even to all Americans. It doesn't erase past wrongs but it may lay the ground for future rights to know that almost all so-called African Americans are part-Caucasian, and a very large percentage of so-called white Americans are part-Native American. If your forebears lived on the frontier, that's probably where you got your excellent cheekbones. But it's not just in America that this happens. The world is a melting pot. Most Filipinos have some Spanish blood and some have Chinese blood. But then, many Chinese have Mongol blood and most Spanish have Arab blood. Many Britons have French or Scandanavian blood. The Welsh may originally have come from the Alps. Poles tend to have German or Russian blood. Bosnians often have Turkish blood. Lebanese often have European blood. Columbus was an ethnic Italian with ties to Portugal, sailing for Spain with a mostly Basque crew. You can't make up stuff like that. Since I like classical music, let me offer some more examples from the ranks of the great composers. The great French composer Lully was Italian. The great Austrian composer Haydn was part-Croatian. The great German composer Beethoven was part-Flemish. The great English composer Holst had a German grandfather while the great Norwegian composer Grieg was the son and grandson of English consuls to Bergen, though both "married local" giving him some actual Scandanavian blood. Cesar Cui, the member of the Russian "Mighty Handful" who wrote polemics for a Russian classical music, was the son of a deserter from Napoleon's army. The French composer Ravel had a Basque mother and the French composer Erik Satie was half-Scottish and the French composer Cesar Franck was really Belgian and the French composer Arthur Honegger was actually Swiss. Percussion in "European" music came from the Middle East and as late as the time of Brahms was referred to as "Turkish effects." Dave Brubeck, who had a hit with "Blue Rondo a la Turk," is part-Native American. The great African American jazz composer Charles Mingus was also part-Chinese and part-Mexican and part-white. For a long time Americans have had a knack for making enemies around the world by allowing an us-and-them mentality to grow in their minds and ours. It happens. But it does no harm to remember from time to time, and perhaps especially when there is a fresh administration of one sort or another, that there is a lot of them in us, and a lot of us in them, and that this not a recent development or a New Age touchy-feely conceit but the simple fact of many centuries' standing.