"Multiculturalism asserts that people with different roots can co-exist, that they can learn to read the image-banks of others, that they can and should look across the frontiers of race, language, gender and age without prejudice or illusion, and learn to think against the background of a hybridized society. It proposes--modestly enough--that some of the most interesting things in history and culture happen at the interface between cultures. It wants to study border situations, not only because they are fascinating in themselves, but because understanding them may bring with it a little hope for the world."

[The United States is a] ". . .gigantic, riven, hybridizing, multiracial republic, which each year receives somewhere between a half and two-thirds of the world's emigration, legal or illegal. By the year 2000, less than 60 percent of the people entering the American workforce will be native-born whites. To put the argument for multiculturalism in merely practical terms of self-interest: Though elites are never going to go away, since the need to create them is written in our biological fabric--whether we choose to kid ourselves about this or not--the composition of those elites is not necessarily static. The future of American ones [i.e., elites], in a globalized economy without a Cold War, will lie with people who can think and act with informed grace across ethnic, cultural, linguistic lines. And the first step in becoming such a person lies in acknowledging that we are not one big world family, or ever likely to be: that these differences are not divagations from a European norm, but structures eminently worth knowing about for their own sake. In the world that is coming, if you can't navigate difference, you've had it."