Most of us come from diverse ethnic backgrounds and are intermingling more and more.
This threat is increased when there is an intermingling of ethnic groups across borders, as is the case with the Kurds of Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
Tom Hanchett, the staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, N.C., coined the useful term "salad bowl suburbs" in 2008 to describe post-World War II suburbs where, as he writes on his Web site, "newcomer and native-born intermingle without ethnic boundaries".
Such maps are easy to read, but they are not very good at portraying complexity, for example areas in which ethnic groups and languages are intermingled.
But it is the very lack of cohesion in our society, the competing and intermingling claims of different ethnic and religious and regional communities of people and artists, of different levels of aspiration, from the most esoteric to the most broadly populist, that makes our country, and our art, great.
Even after the Dayton Accords, the establishment of ethnic ghettos where previously peoples had lived intermingled became an excuse for a less than nurturing peace to restore normalcy to lives of citizens, political accountability and the rule of law.
But in the United States, where ethnic and religious traditions are so often shared and intermingled, Ramadan is becoming a season of spiritual reflection for many non-Muslims as well.
"Ethnic cleansing" has taken its toll, but the three groups live intermingled.
"The people in Mae Aw have intermingled and intermarried so much with so many different ethnic groups in the mountains of northeast Burma and northern Thailand that actually there is no one pure history there," he said.
The Carpathian-Danube region in which the Romanian ethnic community evolved was settled about 2000 bce by migratory Indo-Europeans who intermingled with native Neolithic (New Stone Age) peoples to form the Thracians.
