'This hybridity is not just one of race, but also of all our cultural characteristics and is one of the reasons why the Scotsman David Hume commented that there was no such thing as a national character mixture in England. Americans, like all other civilisations, including English or Scots, are a ‘fiction’, as Daniel Defoe put it – we are all mongrels and mixes, bricolages and bundles. Our imagined communities are invented and constructed to make life tolerable and bear little relation to real ‘facts’. It is important to realise this before we essentialise our differences, which leads to a ghetto mentality, a need to wall and fence and repel the threatening ‘Other’ who is, in fact, probably a distant cousin of some kind.'
