As a Jamaican immigrant arriving in the United States at the age of twenty, Jason Hill noticed how often Americans identified themselves in terms of race and ethnicity. He observed, for example, the reluctance of West Indians to joins "black causes" for fear of losing their identity. He began to ask himself what sort of world he wanted to live in, a quest that in time led him to the idea of the cosmopolitan.

In Becoming a Cosmopolitan, Jason D. Hill argues that we need a new understanding of the self. He revives the idea of the cosmopolitan, the person who identifies the world as home. Arguing for the right to forget where we came from, Hill proposes a new moral cosmopolitanism for the new millennium.