Kwame Anthony Appiah on the Complications of Identity
00:00Kwame 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 Apia, 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 re-election. How honest do I have to?to be. In his new book, The Lies That Bind, Rethinking Identity, Appia argues something that's just a littlebit old-fashioned and not necessarily popular on the left, not with everyone. He says that identitiesof race, gender, culture, country can work against human solidarity and sometimes get in the way ofsolving our problems. And the world as globalized as it is, whether you like it or not, he saysthat we have to change some of our old ways of thinking about who we are and how we really.relate to others. I've known Anthony Appia 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,
01:11and I thought we'd start with your own identity and your parents. Your parents were perhapsone of the most famous marriages in 20th century, Britain and Ghana. Can you tell us that story?Yes, my father was in London as a law student for an astonishingbetween a 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.My mother was working for an organization called Racial Harmony, which looked after colonial students,and that's how they met.
01:49And your father was an important political figure in Ghana.Yes, so he was, among other things, at that point, he was the unofficial representative ofKwame and Krumer, who was going to be.be the first president of Ghana.And he was also very much involved in creation of the first opposition party to Ingrumah,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.
02:20So 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 of Exchequer, leader of the House of Commons. Her grandfather was the first labor leader of the House of Lords. And there were lots of cousins who were distinguished people. A left-leaning aristocratic elite. And they get married and the effect in Britain and in Ghana is what? What is the reaction?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 a cool,to speeches in the South African Parliament
03:14about what was going to happen to Britainif they allowed the daughters of cabinet ministersto 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.So, Anthony, coming from this background,
03:36how 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?It's multiplicity, it's fluidity.You recently wrote an articleabout the phenomenon of people beginning their sentencesor testimonies,
03:53speaking as a woman,speaking as a black woman,Jewish man, whatever.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 Americancitizen of Anglo-Gonean ancestry who's gay.I mean, those are the things.I would have mentioned religion if I had one, but I don't.
04:20So what frustrates you when you hear identity discussed in the university, in the workplace,and in the political realm.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 sensein which my identity is in some way more complicated than some people's.But, you know, if we talk about...But the book suggests that everybody is, to some extent, much more complicated than they let up.
04:55And I think that's right.So, for example, we currently, for obvious reason, 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 the president's whiteness.And some of them are a Baptist 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.
05:26because they're not interacting much of the time with people 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,
05:54reducing 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 stateoccurred because, starting in Britain in the early 19th century,the working class got organized as a class.
06:24they made labour 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 ofthe working classes as having interests in common.You had to think of them as a kind of person.
06:42And they then had to think of themselves that wayin order to get mobilized.Now, they were not just working classany more than anybody was just middle or upper class.But it was an important identityto mobilize around. So if we want to do, and the last chapter of my book is urges us that we doneed to do something about class, the first thing we need to do is to recognize it as a form ofidentity. So if you think, as I do, that there are serious problems of economic inequality
07:09in this country that won't be dealt with unless we think about class, then you don't wantto substitute identity politics for not identity politics. You want to reshape identity politicsto make it more productive, to focus on things that you need to focus on and not to become over-investing.in just one or two kinds of identities.What role did tribalism, nativism,and questions of identity playin a political drama in which the very same countryelected Barack Obama
07:39and then eight years later elected Donald Trump?We'll take the Russian part out of itand all the various shenanigans out of it,but tens of millions of people did vote for Donald Trump.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.And those people were presumably people who thought that they, 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.
08:18You 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 to.trade wars and increasing tariffs.And they now have mostly been persuaded that, well, if that's what my party's in favorof, I'm in favor of it.In other words, what's happened is that a particular person has taken over the leadershipof a particular identity group, namely people who identifies Republicans, and in the few
09:08places where the shifts happened that explain why he got the votes in the electoralcollege that he did, those shifts occurred in people who did indeed make a change ofmind. And I think they made the change of mind some of them because of a real fact. The fact is thatour country is moving away from being a white man's country, and both the white and the man in thereare important, to being what some of us have always hoped it would be, which is an Americancountry in which you could be a happy non-white person and a happy woman and a happy, for that matter,a gay, lesbian, transgender person, and participate on roughly equal terms in the life of theRepublic. And, you know, if you start out with this precious possession of a privileged identity,
09:58it's not nice for you. It's hard. I understand that there's a challenge here. To see it eroded.Some time ago, Claudia Rankine was here. And as you know, among other things, she talks a great dealabout microaggressions, which is not her invention. I think it had earlier roots in academicdiscourse. You are very wary of talking about that in a highly judgmental way. In fact, wearing yourother hat as the New York Times ethicist, not long ago you had a letter from a woman, somebody in aFilipino family, and there was a kind of family drama about in-laws talking insensitively aboutthe ability to tell one Asian from another, as it were. And you said, you know, you might startby recognizing that their attitudes, meaning these relatives who are.
10:45doing the offending. You might start by recognizing that their attitudes most likely reflectignorance rather than malice, and by cutting them some slack. I think that one reason for wantingto cut people slack is that maybe my deepest philosophical conviction is that it's hardto get things right. Knowledge 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.
11:37But 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 in 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.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.
12:09A 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, unquote.Do you worry that we've become complacent about understanding and upholding these values?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.
12:54That's the answer.We're not trying to develop a Muslim view about global warming and a Western view.Better just to say, let's try and figure out what's going on with global warming.And in that sense, I'm a creature of the Enlightenment.I really do believe in the beautiful and the good and the true.Are you feeling lonely these days 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.
13:28That 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. Anthony Appiah,thank you so much. Thank you.Kwame Anthony Appiah.His book, The Lies That Bind,Rethinking Identity, was just published.And you can read his advice on people'sethical dilemmas every week
13:53in the New York Times' ethicist column.
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