I've long held that an appreciation of one's ethnic heritage is important

I guess one of the points I'm trying to make, and one that might be difficult for some people to entirely understand, is that for many, many people, the issue isn't multiculturalism within the community, but multiculturalism within the individual.

For a lot of people, there are too many different ethnic groups within their own individual mix to be able to learn very much about all of them. That, combined with the fact that in many people's family histories the main goal was to fit into the larger, blended culture (at least in the US), and to cast off any cultural aspects that would mark people as "different" than the dominant culture. So the only "heritage" that is passed down comes from that dominant culture.

Combine this with the amount of moving around that a lot of people have been doing even within the US, and even regional US customs might not get passed down through generations.

For many of us, appreciation for, or even awareness of, our ethnic heritage is just not a relevant concept.