At the Oscars last weekend, Sean Penn presented Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu with the Best Picture Oscar and a joke. “Who gave this son of a bitch his green card?” His comment hurt people but it was important that he said it. With a seemingly off-the-cuff remark he reminded billions of people worldwide that for the fifth year in a row America’s most celebrated film came about because America is both a temporary and permanent home to talented hard-working foreigners. Acknowledging Inarritu without acknowledging how he came to make his much beloved film is the ugly habit that perpetuates a damaging fiction of American life.

Rudy Giuliani tried his hand at the same topic last week. His swipe was serious where Penn’s was a joke but both men drew similar reactions in the media. Giuliani blessed us with something approximating the cliché second act plot twist in a romantic comedy when he announced at a GOP fundraising dinner that President Obama doesn’t love America. “He doesn’t love you, and he doesn’t love me.” Giuliani clarified in a follow-up interview that Obama is a patriot but that doesn’t mean he loves his country. (Relationships are so complicated.)

Giuliani and Penn are both savvier than their comments suggest. There’s a political message buried in the birthright narrative that Americans are finally on track to demystify. Beneath the fabled veneer of an all-American childhood is the reality that there is no uniformity to the American way of life. This is a vast, complex, multicultural democracy. Between cities, towns, states, timezones, and even between parents and children, there are stark differences in American upbringings and American lives. Anyone who defines America by his own experience is describing a culture of one.

When Giuliani stated that “[Obama] wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up…” he gets one important fact right. Giuliani and the President have different backgrounds. Giuliani was born and raised in New York. Obama belongs to a group of Americans (and other nationalities) who spent part of their childhood as expatriates. The term Third Culture Kids (now Third Culture Individuals or TCIs) arose in the 1950s to describe American children of expatriate military, foreign service, missionary and business families. Modern surveys on TCIs paint an interesting portrait of the “global citizen” with hallmark traits of linguistic adeptness, creativity, and excellent observational skill, but the salient characteristic of a TCI is multiculturalism.

There are various interpretations of multiculturalism (as one would expect) but the predominant tenet is to preserve and respect cultural and ethnic differences. Coexistence is the goal, rather than dominance by one culture. In extreme situations, rejection of multiculturalism is the justification for genocide. In more moderate societies, cultural intolerance plays out in the economic realm, when minorities suffer without access to the same opportunities as the majority, the armed, or the wealthy. Although the world has always struggled to accommodate cultural differences, modern civilization presents a unique confluence of culture, technology and mobility. In 2015, a person can physically travel to anywhere in the world within 24 hours and can virtually connect with nearly 50% of the world’s population in mere seconds via the internet. This unprecedented proximity of cultures is not optional food for thought. The interconnected world requires multicultural leadership.

Thus, multiculturalism is the key to America’s future. America’s power as a world leader is predicated on a thriving world to lead. (Translation for Team Giuliani: You can’t be great if you’re the only country at the table.) Leadership means fully grasping both your own potential and the potential of those you lead, and those you compete against. A quarterback is nothing without his team, and a great quarterback is the first to acknowledge the talent and efforts of his opponents after the game. Why? The point of competition is to test your skills, not to marginalize others. A victory over the weak is profoundly unexceptional. Collaboration is the unspoken foundation of competition. The ethics of sportsmanship assume that we make each other better by giving our best effort and playing our hardest and fairest. Countries are no different than teams in this regard. America needs the world as much as the world needs us.

As America’s quarterback, Obama has struggled to find his footing. He took office with the expectation that people were rolling up their sleeves beside him, yet his message of multiculturalism and his invitations for all views at the table were met with increasingly virulent suspicion from opponents and supporters alike. The people who voted him into office were unprepared for the “otherness” of his ideology and they reacted by withdrawing. Obama was equally at a loss for how to allay people’s fears. He doggedly stuck with the tactics that won him the presidency — the explanations of inclusion and the promises of cultural prosperity — but the through line of the story wasn’t conveyed: that change begins at the top, but real change happens within the people. This dynamic is at the heart of America’s culture crisis. If we resolve it, we will be exceptional for doing so.

In the meantime, the communication breakdown has spiraled into the worst gridlock in Congressional history and Obama has lost the trust of his constituents. The quarterback is nothing without his team… It’s irrefutable that Obama loves America. He has served as our president for six years, and counting. (If that service isn’t enough for Giuliani then he’s taking the definition of love to a whole new level. I kind of want to go there just to see what I’ve been missing.) However, Obama likely sees one intractable barrier to America’s limitless potential: just like the rest of the world, America is a population of Rudy Giulianis. Not the Giuliani who makes racially insensitive remarks, or spouts provocative political rhetoric, but the broadly-drawn Giuliani who is fearful and suspicious of “other” and demands reassurance that he is exceptional. There’s a Giuliani in each of us and he is at odds with multiculturalism.

The most powerful act of cultural evolution Americans can hope to achieve today is to embrace their diversity. A global community resides within American borders. Acceptance of American diversity as our new millennium identity is a conscious act of self-education, of stepping beyond familiar terrain and learning about the people who reside steps, minutes, or miles away. To fully grasp our potential we need to know each other. With one click we can learn about, connect with, and even see people far beyond our own borders.

We have in Obama a president who is uniquely suited to help us balance a multitude of views. A TCI president was an intelligent choice to grow America’s position as world leader in the Information Age. Obama possesses both an abiding love of this country and a deep understanding of the riches of the world at large. His espousal of multicultural views is exceptional in the canon of presidential rhetoric. However, for this president to be effective Americans must actively embrace diversity on an individual level with self-directed hiring practices, awareness of conflicts, and learned skill at resolving intercultural differences. No policy will make the difference. Obama can only lead by example.

Sean Penn knew there was a high probability he’d be handing the Best Picture Oscar to Alejandro Inarritu, his Mexican friend and colleague. I expect the “green card” comment was a calculated statement, not a flippant joke. Ever the activist, Penn took it on the chin for progress and invited people to hate him for the sake of opening dialogue. The hurt people feel at the mention of “green card” is not because Penn said the words, but because of what those words have come to signify in daily American life: other, different, less than, less American. Wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up. Doesn’t love you, and doesn’t love me. That story is out of date. The new romantic tale of America is one where we take our love to the next level and learn to embrace who we want to be, a society of tolerant, peacefully coexisting people who draw on our vast, diverse strengths, each of us different, all of us equal.