The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture

THE OMNI-AMERICANS is a book that takes its stand in direct opposition to much of the biographical, autobiographical, sociological, and fictional representations of U.S. Negro life that have emerged in the past decade - including such acclaimed works as Kenneth Clark's "Dark Ghetto", "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (the Moynihan Report)", and William Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner". With verve, wit, and keen intelligence Murray argues that U.S. negroes are neither creatures of a deficient and debilitating culture (hapless victims of "cultural deprivation") nor uprooted Africans cruelly denied their rightful heritage on the shores of "white America", but are in fact Americans - as American as the frontiersman - who not only are an essential part of the American cultural "Mainstream" but one of its foremost creators. It is as Americans of long standing and full stature, he maintains, that Negroes must claim and be accorded the social and economic rights they have been denied. From this perspective, he examines, in the last section of THE OMNI-AMERICANS, the current demand for courses and departments of black studies. Although in part a discussion of one of America's most disastrous social problems, this interrelated collection of essays is more than anything else a contribution to the understanding of American life and culture, and a document in the history of the country's national self-awareness.