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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Kwame Anthony Appiah on the Complications of Identity
00:14:02
Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of leading thinkers on identity. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Appiah also writes the New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist column, answering readers’ questions on a wide range of common but thorny problems of modern life. He came to his interest in identity early, as his parents—an Englishwoman from a politically prominent family and an anti-colonial agitator descended from Ghanaian royalty—became notorious in Britain for their interracial marriage. While his own identity may be seen as complicated, he thinks that each of our identities is also more complicated than our current way of thinking allows us to acknowledge. In his new book, “The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity,” Appiah takes a position that is somewhat contrary to the identity politics of the left. He tells David Remnick that a focus on individual identities—whether addressed through race, gender, culture, or country—can work against human solidarity, and sometim...
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- [00:00]
A
Kwame Anthony Appiah has spent much of his professional life trying to answer very simple questions like who am I? What are you? What's the right thing to do? He's a professor of philosophy and law at New York University and a leading thinker on identity. But I think it's important to note with Appiah, he's not only a man of the academy. He writes the Ethicist column in the New York Times Magazine, answering readers questions on matters of parenting and dating and so on. Recently somebody asked him, I'm running for reelection. How honest do I have to be? In his new book, the Lies that Rethinking Identity, Appiah argues something that's just a little bit old fashioned and not necessarily popular on the left, not with everyone. He says that identities of race, gender, culture, country can work against human solidarity and sometimes get in the way of solving our problems. And with the world as globalized as it is, whether you like it or not, he says that we have to change some of our old ways of thinking about who we are and how we relate to others. I've known Anthony Appiah for a long time and we sat down recently to talk. Anthony, you've written this wonderful book about identity that began as a series of lectures, and I thought we'd start with your own identity and your parents. Your parents were perhaps one of the most famous marriages in 20th century Britain and Ghana. Can you tell us that story?
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B
Yes. My father was in London as a law student for an astonishingly long time because most of what he was doing wasn't law, but anti colonial agitation. He used to go to Hyde Park Corner to speak against the British, even during the war. So he was there and he met my mother. And my mother was working for an organization called Racial Harmony, which looked after colonial students, and that's how they met.
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A
And your father was an important political figure in Ghana?
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B
Yes. So he was, among other things at that point, he was the unofficial representative of Kwame Nkrumah, who was going to be the first president of Ghana. And he was also very much involved in creation of the first opposition party to Nkrumah, which grew out of the Asante elite to which he belonged. His father was the brother in law and the secretary of the King of Ashanti. And later on, my Uncle Matthew became the next king of Asante. So he was very much connected with sort of old royalty in Kumasi, where we grew up. And my mother's family was also, you know, her father was Chancellor, legal House of Commons. Her grandfather was the first Labor Leader of the House of Lords. And there were lots of cousins who were so kind of distinguished people.
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A
A left leaning, left leanocratic elite.
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B
Yes.
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A
And they get married. And the effect in Britain and in Ghana is what. What is the reaction?
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B
You have to remember that I wasn't there. Our sense of it came from our parents who kept these newspaper scrapbooks of the coverage. And, you know, it went from the most extreme coverage was in South Africa and places like that. And actually some American regional newspapers in the south through Ebony magazine, which thought this was kind of cool. Two speeches in the South African parliament about what was going to happen to Britain if they allowed the daughters of cabinet ministers to marry what they called blanket natives. I assume that means natives who wear blankets. And my mother got horrible letters mostly from white women around the empire and the world, telling her that she was letting the side down.
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A
So, Anthony, coming from this background, how does this shape identity, which is the subject of the book, your own identity, how you view it or how you don't view it, Its multiplicity, its fluidity? You recently wrote an article about the phenomenon of people beginning their sentences or testimonies speaking as a woman, speaking as a black woman, Jewish man, whatever.
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B
Because the combination of identities that I have is a bit unusual. I mean, if I'm asked to say what I am quickly, I suppose I would say I'm an American citizen of Anglo Ghanaian ancestry who's gay. I mean, those are the things I would have mentioned religion if I had one, but I don't.
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A
So what frustrates you when you hear identity discussed in the university, in the workplace and in the political realm?
- [04:30]
B
I think the main thing that worries me is that even people who people think of as not very complicated, in fact, have quite complicated identities. I mean, I've said that I come to this the way I do because there's an obvious sense in which my identity is in some way more complicated than some people's. But, you know, if we talk about.
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A
But the book suggests that everybody is to some extent much more complicated than they let us.
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B
And I think that's right. So, for example, we currently, for obvious reasons, do a great deal of talking about something we call the white working class. But their whiteness, such as it is, is not the same as the whiteness of everybody else. It's not the same as president's whiteness. And some of them are Baptists and some of them are not. And that might matter a great deal to them. Some are born again, some are not. These other dimensions of their identity are for many, many practical purposes, more important to them than their white identity because they're not interacting much of the time who aren't white. So race is, for a lot of the time, not super important. So if you're trying to make a republic, we need to think about our fellow citizens, as it were, as they are. And what they are is complicated, not simple. And reducing them to anything, including a political identity, reducing them to Republican, Democrat, Independent, reducing them to weight, reducing them to working class and so on, just will get you in a mess. That's one thing. Another thing is if we're going to do things about the economics, I think history suggests that we're going to need identities to do it. The great successes that created the modern welfare state occurred because starting in Britain in the early 19th century, the working class got organized as a class. They made labor unions, they had working men's associations. When Frederick Douglass went to England, he talked to working men's associations. So you couldn't do that unless you got. It wasn't just that you had to think of the working classes as having interests in common. You had to think of them as a kind of person, and they then had to think of themselves that way in order to get mobilized. Now, they were not just working class any more than anybody was just middle or upper class. But it was an important identity to mobilize around. So if we want to do, and the last chapter of my book urges us, that we do need to do something about class, the first thing we need to do is to recognize it as a form of identity. So if you think, as I do, that there are serious problems of economic inequality in this country that won't be dealt with unless we think about class, then you don't want to substitute identity politics for not identity politics. You want to reshape identity politics to make it more productive, to focus on things that you need to focus on and not to become over invested in just one or two kinds of identities.
- [07:28]
A
What role did tribalism, nativism and questions of identity play in a political drama in which the very same country elected Barack Obama and then eight years later elected Donald Trump? We'll take the Russian part out of it and all the various shenanigans out of it. But tens of millions of people did vote for Donald Trump.
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B
Yes. Well, because of the way our electoral system works, we should begin by recording that more people didn't vote for Donald Trump in the United States, Fair enough. Than did. And those people were presumably people who thought that the right thing, mostly thought that the right thing had been done in electing Barack Obama and that they were hoping to continue his legacy. You have to remember that in the United States, most people vote the way they do because it's the way they've always voted. So a significant number of people will have voted for Donald Trump just because he was the person produced by the Republican process. And the fact that they continue to support him, even though you can see that he's doing things that the Republican Party used to be against, like cozying up to Russia, like starting trade wars and increasing tariffs. And they now have mostly been persuaded that, well, if that's what my party's in favor of, I'm in favor of it. In other words, what's happened is that a particular person has taken over the leadership of a particular identity group, namely people who identify as Republicans. And in the few places where the shifts happened that explain why he got the votes in the Electoral College that he did, those shifts occurred in people who did indeed make a change of mind. And I think they made the change of mind, some of them, because of a real fact. The fact is that our country is moving away from being a white man's country. And both the white and the man in there are important to being what some of us have always hoped it would be, which is an American country in which you could be a happy non white person and a happy woman, and a happy, for that matter, gay, lesbian, transgender person, and participate on roughly equal terms in the life of the republic. And, you know, if you start out with this precious possession of a privileged identity, it's not nice for you. It's hard. I understand that there's a challenge here.
- [10:03]
A
To see it eroded.
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B
To see it eroded.
- [10:05]
A
Some time ago, Claudia Reinkine was here, and as you know, among other things, she talks a great deal about microaggressions, which is not her invention. I think it had earlier roots in academic discourse. You are very wary of talking about that in a highly judgmental way. In fact, wearing your other hat as the New York Times ethicist, not long ago you had a letter from a woman, somebody in a Filipino family, and there was a kind of family drama about in laws talking insensitively about the ability to tell one Asian, from another, as it were. And you said you might start by recognizing that their attitudes, meaning these relatives who are doing the offending, you might start by recognizing that their attitudes most likely reflect ignorance rather than malice, and by cutting them some slack.
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B
I think that one reason for wanting to cut people slack is that maybe My deepest philosophical conviction is that it's hard to get things right. Knowledge is usually is a difficult achievement for us. So is leading a good life. And yes, people will screw up. That's a feature of our nature and our situation. The helpful thing to do when people screw up is to try and sort of help them pick themselves up and dust themselves off and start off in a better direction, not to stigmatize them and push them down. I'm perfectly happy to criticize people who behave badly, but I think also it's important to understand them, and here's one reason why it's important to understand them. If you understand what it is about a person and her circumstances that makes her do something, you might be able to change her circumstances in a way that makes her not want to do that anymore.
- [11:56]
A
Anthony, finally, you've packed a lot into a relatively short book. And one of the things is a kind of large cultural project that you're advocating. You're asking readers to feel a sense of ownership over universal values. And you write this a culture of liberty, tolerance and rational inquiry. That would be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a Western destiny. Do you worry that we've become complacent about understanding and upholding these values?
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B
Yes, and I think that some of the responsibility for that comes from movements within the academies. It isn't all just the result of bad behavior on the part of a few people in one party. I think it's hard to figure out sometimes what the right answer is in moral context. But I believe there is one. And if there is one, then it doesn't matter whether you're Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or atheist. That's the answer. We're not trying to develop a Muslim view about global warming and a Western view about better, just to say, let's try and figure out what's going on with global warming. And that in that sense, I'm a creature of enlightenment. I really do believe in the beautiful and the good and the true.
- [13:15]
A
Are you feeling lonely these days?
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B
In that I'm feeling that people have come to see that losing track of that idea was a big loss. So I'm feeling a temptation, at least on the part of many people, to come back to that. The sort of basic thought that we'll be able to run the world much better if we agree that what we're trying to do is to make sense of it together.
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A
Anthony Appiah, thank you so much.
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B
Thank you.
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A
Kwame. Anthony Appiah, his book the Lies that Rethinking Identity was just published, and you can read his advice on people's ethical dilemmas every week in the New York Times Ethicist column.