The Omni-American Tradition: An Affirmative Alternative to Resentment

Adapted from a lecture delivered at a January 2026 one-day seminar, “An Introduction to the Omni-American Tradition,” at the Azrieli Center for Israel Studies at Ben-Gurion University

A community has recently come together around a concept that goes by the name “Omni-Americanism.” The term itself is over half a century old. It was coined by the culture critic Albert Murray (more about him in a minute) in his 1970 book The Omni-Americans. 

One of the central features of Omni-Americanism, one of its chief attractions to those who find themselves inspired by it, is that it offers an antidote to the toxic resentment—or to use Nietzsche’s term ressentiment from The Genealogy of Morals—that currently drives so much of American political and cultural conflict. It’s no secret that ideologies committed to understanding the world in starkly identitarian terms have been on the rise in the US since at least 2010. What passes for a left has, in institution after institution, divided up American society into virtuous and vicious identity groups, the one consisting of “oppressed” categories of people and the other of “oppressors,” whose supposed privileges must be revoked and redistributed to the oppressed.¹ Meanwhile, the American right is going through a spasm of anti-immigrant hatred, a renewed, Gen-Z flavored white supremacism, and an antisemitism that largely recycles old slanders in updated, social-media-ready dress.²

Omni-Americanism stands as an affirmative alternative to all these resentment-laden negations. On the Omni-American view, defining identity through grievance is not only culturally inaccurate but also psychologically destructive, as it reduces complex human lives to categories of suffering and pathology. Before I spell out the features of Omni-Americanism and define the affirmative alternative to resentment it offers, let me say a bit about the concept’s creator, Albert Murray. 

Life of Albert Murray

Albert Murray was born Albert Lee Young on May 12, 1916 in Nokomis, AL. He was given up for adoption by his parents and adopted by the Murrays, who raised him with their other adopted children in Magazine Point, near Mobile, AL. Murray enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute in 1935, where he met Ralph Ellison, the author of the 1952 novel Invisible Man. He graduated in 1939, and pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. Murray then taught English and American literature and directed theater at Tuskegee. In 1943, after the U.S. joined the war, he enrolled in the Air Force. With the Air Force, Murray traveled widely, including to Africa. He ultimately retired with the rank of major in 1962. Along the way, thanks to the G.I. Bill, Murray earned an M.A. in English at NYU in 1948.

Murray’s writing began in earnest after he retired from the Air Force and settled in Harlem with his wife, Mozelle. They remained married for 72 years, separated only by Murray’s passing in 2013. Murray also used his newly acquired free time to deepen his long-running friendship and critical dialogue with Ralph Ellison, as the two men shared a commitment to the blues and jazz as models of artistic discipline, irony, and resilience. For Murray, the “blues idiom” was not just an artistic tradition but an all-encompassing, deeply affirmative, meaning-making approach to life’s inherent chaos and absurdity.

Narratives of Pathology and Grievance Reinforce the “Folklore of White Supremacy” and the “Fakelore of Black Pathology”

Murray was convinced not only that art ideally addressed the universal human condition but also that the universal human condition was in turn ideally addressed through art. He was especially skeptical of the claims of social science to comprehend and address human experience in general and the experience of black Americans in particular. In his view, social scientists were more interested in depicting black deviancy and degradation than in actually understanding the complexity of black life in America. Moreover, he was critical of grievance- and protest-oriented black authors such as James Baldwin and Richard Wright, whom he saw as in effect collaborating with social scientists in depicting blackness as a condition of unrelenting pathology. This is the essence of the Omni-American diagnosis or critique of identitarian grievance and the resentment to which it gives rise. Grievance and resentment, often informed by social science fictions about black squalor, reinforce what Murray called the “folklore of white supremacy” and its counterpart, the “fakelore of black pathology.”³

Murray criticized social scientists who use questionable statistics to depict black life as merely a set of deficits, suffering, and “deviations”⁴ from white norms. He was particularly unhappy with widely read social science texts of his day, such as Kenneth Bancroft Clark’s 1964 book, Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness, and the 1965 Moynihan Report titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. By insisting that a history of oppression has reduced black Americans to  “a tangle of pathology,”⁵ whose experience could be summed up in figures about poverty, crime, and family dysfunction, social scientists were unable “to do justice to what U.S. Negroes like about being black and to what they like about being Americans.”⁶

To Murray’s consternation, the “tangle of pathologies” diagnosed by social scientists was elaborated and extended into fiction by protest writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright.  Their grievance-based narratives, with litanies of black suffering and debasement, essentially agree with white supremacists that black people are damaged and inferior. They are, for Murray, the flip side of the social science coin—

In addition to promoting bogus social theories, Murray thought protest literature often played to a white audience’s desire to hear black people “moaning and groaning about black troubles and miseries.”⁸

Murray wanted to insist instead on the cultural achievements of black Americans, which have resulted in “the most complicated culture, and therefore the most complicated sensibility in the modern world.”⁹ Murray criticized black militants and separatists in terms similar to those in which he criticized protest authors. He writes—

According to Murray, this was not the only way in which protest-oriented writers and militants shot themselves in the foot—

One can see Murray’s patriotism and sense of ownership of his country here. He very much considered himself and other black Americans as indigenous (his term!) to America, not as a kidnapped African.¹² Indeed, he had no patience for black Americans who “identify themselves not with the United States but with Africa,” viewing such a posture as “political naiveté coupled with an incredible disregard for the dynamics of socio-cultural evolution.”¹³ He even rejected the term “African American.”¹⁴

In contrast to the grievance and negations of which he was so critical, Murray wanted, in The Omni-Americans, to point to “some of the affirmative implications of [black American] history.”¹⁵ He had no patience for those who sought to promote a feeling of alienation from the U.S. and its institutions, proclaiming bluntly, “The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the social, economic, and political heritage of all Americans.”¹⁶ And although he was critical of militants and separatists, he was fully on board with the civil rights movement. “It is the political behavior of black activists,” he wrote, “that best represents the spirit of such constitutional norm-ideals as freedom, justice, equality, fair representation, and democratic processes.”¹⁷

In contrast to the grievance and negations of which he was so critical, Murray wanted, in The Omni-Americans, to point to “some of the affirmative implications of [black American] history.” He had no patience for those who sought to promote a feeling of alienation from the U.S. and its institutions…

Now, to return to literature: Insofar as literature and art do represent black suffering, Murray thought they could do so with aesthetic excellence and integrity if (like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) they made “the Negro’s obvious predicament symboliz[e] everybody’s essential predicament.”¹⁵ If, that is, through black characters and situations literature and art confronted the “ambiguities and absurdities inherent in all human experience”¹⁶ and did so, moreover, without naively supposing that some pat political or social program could be implemented that would solve all our problems. He thought life was too complex and unpredictable for totalizing solutions like Marxism to produce anything like a Utopia. (He derisively called Marx’s writings “gospel”¹⁷ and an “all-purpose device or magic cure.”¹⁸) Again, he thought America’s founding documents were the best set of norms, especially when they were respected and adhered to, to govern our collective lives together.

So, we may sum up this part of the essay by concluding that Murray saw victimhood and narratives of black degradation as a trap. If black people are nothing but victims of white people, then white people get to define the terms of black existence. If black people are degraded or deviant, then white people really are superior. Moreover, if the entire content of black identity is the experience of oppression, then what are we to make of what Murray calls the “incontestable fact” that black people have not just survived but thrived with “gusto and a sense of elegance”?¹⁹

The “Omni-American” Reality Undermines Separatist Resentment and Pretensions of White Supremacy Alike

Murray argues that the very basis for both identity-based resentment and identity-based feelings of superiority—the idea of separate and unequal “black” and “white” cultures—is a fiction. One of his most important moves in The Omni-Americans is to assert that American identity is composite. Indeed, it’s the very move the title makes, as he explains early in the Introduction—

It’s not that Murray thinks there are no ethnic differences. In fact, he writes, “Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity.”²¹ The point is that as Americans, we’ve all mutually influenced one another to such an extent that what we share is much greater than what we do not.

You’ll notice at the beginning of the quotation that he rejects an orientation toward race—which he calls “a sterile category”²²—and an embrace of ethnicity and culture. Race, he writes, “is hardly as useful as an index to human motives as is culture.”²³ He believed that “Identity is best defined in terms of culture.”²⁴ It is not a person’s race that makes them an American, but their culture. In thinking about identity, we should be “fully oriented to cultural diversity—and not hung up on race.”²⁵ Unlike most other national cultures, American culture is not the product of an homogenous ethnic group that has resided since time immemorial in a given place. Rather, he writes, “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto.”²⁶

Murray also rejects the term “non-white” because it defines black people only by what they are not (a grievance-based definition) rather than what they are. He argues that culturally, black Americans, for all their distinctive cultural contributions, are “Omni-Americans.”

Murray also rejects the term “non-white” because it defines black people only by what they are not (a grievance-based definition) rather than what they are. He argues that culturally, black Americans, for all their distinctive cultural contributions, are “Omni-Americans.”

“One way of not seeing U.S. Negroes for what they are is to call them non-white.” Such neologisms are, he writes, “the all-seasons game of U.S. color oneupmanship.” Here’s his hilarious dissection of the game— 

He points out that in fact, most native-born black Americans, “far from being non-white, are in fact part-white.”²⁸ More importantly, “[t]hey are also by any meaningful definition of culture, part-Anglo-Saxon, and they are overwhelmingly Protestant.”²⁹ He expands—

Once again, attempts to separate in order to segregate fail when confronted with the Omni-American reality.

Finally, we come to what can be called the fallacy of exclusion. The Omni-American reality neither allows whites the comforting fiction that black people are an excluded or excludable “Other,” an unassimilable outsider, nor does it allow black people the resentment-feeding perception that they are forever excluded from the mainstream. Yes, black Americans have been subjected to profound oppression, segregation, and legal double standards. Yet Murray asserts the rightful place of black people at the center of American life—

With this invocation of the blues idiom, we come to the fourth part of this essay.

The Blues Idiom as an Antidote to Resentment

Albert Murray proposes that an embrace of the “blues idiom” represents a superior alternative to the politics of grievance. He notes with incredulity that—

What exactly are these blues idiom “survival techniques and equipment for living”? Allow me to present a quotation and then pull some features out of it—

Here are the five points I want to pull from this quotation.

1. Confrontation rather than escapism: The blues idiom is not a form of escapism. Rather, it is a confrontation with the human condition, with “the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence.” The blues idiom embodies facing reality squarely and honestly.
2. Improvisation within constraints: Blues idiom-oriented Americans, in their confrontation with reality, improvise and extemporize, but always with an awareness of the constraints that the situation imposes. Indeed, only when one understands the constraints of one’s situation can one discern the possibilities for improvisation and play. To take the concrete example of blues music: it operates within recognizable and fairly predictable structures of key signature, rhythm, chord progression, and so on, yet meaning and novelty emerges through creative variation within the limits these aspects of form impose. This is a microcosm for how blues-oriented human beings operate within their historical, social, and existential constraints.
3. Play, style, ritual, art: As an improvisatory form, the blues idiom is playful. But it is not random play. It’s a play that embodies style or form, and imposes it on the chaos of the world, thus humanizing the chaos. Stylized play gets formalized into ritual and art, both of which serve to structure experience. The style inherent to the blues idiom makes it an “esthetic equipment for living”—a means of preserving dignity, coherence, and equipoise under adverse conditions. Style is what makes survival human rather than merely animal or biological.
4. “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”: By imposing form on the chaos of experience through play and stylization, the blues idiom creates meaning where there was none. The blues does not primarily offer therapy, nor is it a form of protest: instead, it is a matter of signification—creating meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.
5. Affirmation rather than self-pity: Despite popular misconceptions, the blues is not a music of sorrow or complaint. (Murray wrote an entire book, Stomping the Blues [1976], in order to set the record straight on this matter.) The blues acknowledges “rough times” and “bad news”³⁴ but instead of responding to them with negation or rejection, and thus with resentment, it responds with affirmation, improvisation, and style. It is a music of resilience rather than of brokenness.

Along these lines, Murray writes:

The spirit of the blues moves in the opposite direction from ashes and sackcloth, self-pity, self-hatred, and suicide.

How does the blues achieve this? Here’s Murray in a 2001 book titled From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity:

For Murray, the confrontational, improvisatory, playful, stylizing, and affirmative way of moving through the world that is the blues idiom represents an “heroic response” to the human condition, which of course is incompatible with resentment. He defined heroism as “another word for self-reliance,” a character trait which “is not only the indispensable prerequisite for productive citizenship in an open society” but “also that without which no individual or community can remain free.”³⁷ There is, then, a sharp contrast to be seen here between the Omni-American blues hero (who acts and improvises and affirms life) and the “nonheroic”³⁸ protesting victim (who complains and negates and resents). 

One of Murray’s clearest articulations of this heroic stance is a dynamic he calls “antagonistic cooperation.” He spells it out in his 1973 book, The Hero and the Blues:

This is to say that obstacles, difficulties, injustices—in a word, dragons—all “serve [the hero’s] purpose” “by bringing out the best in him.”⁴⁰ And of course, bigger and scarier dragons call out ever more heroic responses. “Heroism,” he writes, “is measured in terms of the stress and strain it can endure and the magnitude and complexity of the obstacles it overcomes.”⁴¹ In The Hero and the Blues, Murray writes that “the blues tradition” is a “uniquely American context of antagonistic cooperation.”⁴² He sees the blues idiom as being, at least in part, the heroic response elicited by the dragons of slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of oppression historically experienced by black Americans. 

Murray contrasts contemporary protest writers with blues idiom-oriented writers. Writers of protest fiction are, he says, “professional supplicants who are in the grotesquely pathetic position of making urgent requests which they cannot possibly believe will be honored by the enemy.”⁴³ In contrast—

Murray suggests that the real tradition of black overcoming—indeed, the tradition that actually allowed black Americans to overcome—is grounded in this heroic blues idiom tradition of “confrontation and improvisation,” not in a passive and resentful yielding to victimhood and supplicating of the antagonist.In conclusion, the Omni-American vision sees identity-based grievance as a reductionist trap. If people define themselves solely through the lens of what has been done to them—a lens of oppression, grievance, and resentment—they risk erasing what they themselves have actually done—their cultural achievements and their heroic dragon-slaying. Murray champions a shift from resentment of white power to the affirmation of black power—defined not as militancy and separatism, but as the recognition of the central, undeniable, and heroic role of black folks in creating our complex and composite Omni-American culture.

1. On this, see especially Yascha Mounk’s 2023 book The Identity Trap. New York: Penguin Press. ↩︎
2. On antisemitic right-wing social media influencers, see Christine Rosen’s “Hating Jews for Fun and Profit” in the December 2025 issue of Commentary. ↩︎
3. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans. Library of America, 2020: p. 10. ↩︎
4. Omni-Americans, p. 32 et passim. ↩︎
5. Omni-Americans, p. 40. ↩︎
6. Omni-Americans, p. 9. ↩︎
7. Omni-Americans, p. 11. ↩︎
8. Omni-Americans, p. 145. ↩︎
9. Omni-Americans, pp. 152-3 (original emphasis). ↩︎
10. Omni-Americans, p. 187. ↩︎
11. Omni-Americans, p. 23. ↩︎
12. Murray uses the term “indigenous” with respect to black Americans and black American culture in three places in Omni-Americans: pp. 19, 51, and 102. ↩︎
13. Omni-Americans, p. 141. ↩︎
14. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Foreword,” the Omni-Americans ↩︎
15. Omni-Americans, p. 9. ↩︎
16. Omni-Americans, p. 42 (original emphasis). ↩︎
17. Omni-Americans, p. 36. ↩︎
18. Omni-Americans, p. 154. ↩︎
19. Omni-Americans, p. 9 ↩︎
20. Omni-Americans, p. 106. ↩︎
21. Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues. New York: Vintage, 1973: p. 100. ↩︎
22. Omni-Americans, p. 10. ↩︎
23. Omni-Americans, pp. 6-7. ↩︎
24. Omni-Americans, p. 7. ↩︎
25. Omni-Americans, p. 23. ↩︎
26. Omni-Americans, p. 51. ↩︎
27. Omni-Americans, p. 23. ↩︎
28. Omni-Americans, p. 11. ↩︎
29. Omni-Americans, p. 23 (original emphasis). ↩︎
30. Omni-Americans, p. 74. ↩︎
31. Omni-Americans, p. 74. ↩︎
32. Omni-Americans, p. 74. ↩︎
33. Omni-Americans, p. 70. ↩︎
34. Omni-Americans, p. 57. ↩︎
35. Omni-Americans, p. 57. ↩︎
36. Omni-Americans, p. 55-6. ↩︎
37. Omni-Americans, p. 56. ↩︎
38. Omni-Americans, p. 135-6. ↩︎
39. Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs, New York: Library of America, Vol. 284, 2016: p. 720. ↩︎
40. The Hero and the Blues, p. 44. ↩︎
41. The Hero and the Blues, p. 44. ↩︎
42. The Hero and the Blues, pp. 37-8.  ↩︎
43. The Hero and the Blues, p. 38. ↩︎
44. The Hero and the Blues, pp. 38. ↩︎
45. The Hero and the Blues, p. 58. ↩︎
46. The Hero and the Blues, p. 48. ↩︎
47. The Hero and the Blues, p. 49. ↩︎