"One day, people will realize they are a mongrel people with a mongrel history."
The man sitting opposite me isn't a rightwing politician, a racial purist or a eugenicist. He's Caryl Phillips -- and he believes that "mongrelization" is the best thing that can happen to us.
Phillips doesn't use words lightly -- after all, he's a prize-winning writer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and holds professorships in literature and in migration and social order at New York's Columbia University. For him, "mongrelization" carries only positive connotations: It is the key to a tolerant, mature society in which individuals are "not bound any more by the old essentialisms of race or nationality or language," but are enabled to "reach a sense of understanding of who they are in the world."