New York City ( CNN ) -- Who am I ? I am an American from the soles of my feet to the hair that once adorned my bald head . An American whose black-skinned ancestors were stolen from their lives and cultures and piled in the holds of ships like so many sacks of skin . An American whose Jewish ancestors stowed their lives into the holds of later vessels running from a thousand years of anti-Semitism that was soon to blossom into a Holocaust . An American whose ancestors walked across the frozen waters from Asia to North America discovering a new world that would one day be stolen from their descendants . An English-speaking American whose language is also whispering French from my Louisiana relatives and sublime Spanish from the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans I rubbed shoulders with growing up in Southern California . A man whose music is the blues that became rock and roll and hip-hop , jazz that is the bastard and the heir of the unconsecrated coupling between Africa and Europe . Who am I ? I am a man formed by history but oddly lacking in a clear perspective of the past . A man with so much to me that there is no clear identity to grab onto or claim . I might be related to Thomas Jefferson or any of 10,000 masters who raped and sometimes even loved their slaves . Who am I ? I am the target of ad men and pollsters , census takers and the evening news . To some I am the enemy , both inside this nation and internationally . To some I am a brother . I can be at the same time invisible and yet profiled , counted and yet forgotten , imprisoned by circumstance and yet declared free by one of the great documents of political history . I am prejudged for my skin color , gender , age , education , and even for some things that I 've done wrong . I am a minor shareholder in the great corporation of America and therefore responsible for everything good and bad that we 've done in the name of business , things we did before I was born and events that shall occur after I 'm gone . I am the amalgamation of all the ignorance , ambitions , yearnings for freedom , and religions of the world . I am -- have been -- brainwashed so many times that innocence is second nature to me . Contradictorily , America is what I am but not my history , not my identity . I am a new man almost every day . I and mine were once colored , Negro , black , Afro-American , African-American , brother , sister , Uncle Tom , revolutionary , good one , bad one , convict , malingerer , miracle , and so much more . In the end I can say with conviction that I am America . Through my veins run 10,000 years of history that touches every continent , deity , and crime known to humanity . This history is not composed of the false accounts of the past ; it is the blood and the beat and the light that passes through my mind , and yours . I am your sibling whether you know it or not , whether you accept me or not . We , known and unknown to each other , form an identity that I can express but still not know , not completely . And for this state of being I am infinitely grateful because it means that I can be part of something greater than the individual , while still I am at home in my heart .
Walter Mosley : `` I 'm an American from the soles of my feet to the hair that once adorned my head '' In the mix are African , Jewish , Asian ancestors ; French-speakers , Latinos on the street . " The problem is not so much with the fact that there were no black people in America before slavery but rather how they were treated by their white masters. `` I can be part of something greater than the individual , while still I am at home in my heart ''