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Kwame Anthony Appiah is a black American homosexual, descended from an Afro-British aristocratic family and speaks English with the BBC accent that is learned in the best schools in the United Kingdom. One can think, correctly, that these traits already tell us something about him.
Appiah, a philosophy professor in New York, knows certain topics matter: He's made a career studying concepts like blackness and homosexuality, social labels that guide us through humanity's elusive diversity – but he is keen to let us know that most of they are just sheer nonsense.
Let's take race. Thomas Jefferson, often touted as the most enlightened of American thinkers, believed that black people smell more than whites, need less sleep, and while having good memories, fail to master geometry. Today no one can regard so foolish and outrageous a view as enlightened; but, as we know, it was the product of a time when white colonialists peddled the idea of an inferior race to justify the mass exploitation of slavery.
“The truth is, there are no races,” Appiah declared in a 1985 essay that earned him fame among philosophers and social theorists and notoriety among his African-American peers. “'Whites' invented blacks to dominate them,” he later wrote in the award-winning In My Father's House (1992)
Appiah's argument is based on science. In nature, there are few options, and biologists know that variations in skin color do not correlate with other inherited characteristics, and there are as many genetic variations among ethnic groups as there are between people. This could not be associated, he wrote in that book, with the idea of a "racial essence" passing from parents to children and influencing every aspect of life, from intelligence to good looks to musical talent.
The consequences of the idea of racial essence have been enormous, even revolutionary. The stigma of “falsehood” has been stamped on the face of humanity, and Appiah, a cosmopolitan who abhors anything that prevents the truth from being seen, is determined to snatch it away with one excruciating blow. His critics have argued that Appiah's position amounts to saying that the very idea of race is a pure fiction. “I've moved away from that a bit – he says -. But just a little."
A marriage from gravure
Appiah owns a sheep farm in New Jersey, but we meet in his New York apartment, where the walls are littered with books, including the 170 novels he is to read as judging panel for this year's Man Booker Prize.
He has rules about who to let into the house. Mayan leaders are not welcome: the quota has already been exceeded. Nor are British works of art allowed: he already has one by the “greatest portrait painter” Augustus John. Artifacts from China and Cuba are also off the list. “I dare to add something as long as it comes from somewhere in the world that I have nothing about,” Appiah explains.
Cosmopolitanism is a trait he acquired at birth. The marriage of her parents was gravure is said to have even inspired in part Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the film about interracial marriage with Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier. The film was released in 1967, the very year Thurgood Marshall became the first African American to enter the supreme court. But when the "royal" wedding was announced 14 years earlier in London, it shattered contemporary ideas about race and national hierarchies.
Peggy Cripps was the daughter of former Labor Chancellor Sir Stafford Cripps; Joe Appiah was a law student and the London representative of Kwame Nkrumah, then prime minister of the Gold Coast, then still a British colony. Cripps was determined to fight the racist censure of some of his peers. “If as Europeans we find it difficult to mix, then I will side with black people,” he told the Sunday Express. A few years after Kwame's birth in 1954, the Gold Coast became the independent state of Ghana.
Between Ghana and il Gloucestershire
Appiah carries herself with the ease of a native and the critical eye of an outsider. “It's very easy for someone with my background to be relatively relaxed [in different countries],” he says. “I learned, very young, the code-switching necessary to move from one place to another”. The first part of his childhood was spent in the Ghanaian city of Kumasi. The gold-rich Ashanti region had long since ceased to have his empire, but still retained traces of his former status. When the king died in 1970, his successor was a man Appiah had known as Uncle Matthew. The Ashanti were on good terms with Nigerian merchants as well as Middle Eastern traders. “It all felt so natural,” Appiah wrote. “I don't remember ever wondering why these people had come to settle among us of their own free will to carry on their businesses so far from home.”
In the Gloucestershire village of Minchinhampton, where he spent time with his grandmother while attending school in Dorset, the story was different. There was no hostility, but "the color of my skin and the African descent that I shared with my sisters made us different," Appiah points out. Even a few years ago, a participant in Appiah's lectures at the Aristotelian Society in London wondered aloud how a non-white lecturer could master the English language so well.
Le "culture national” they are an inseparable mix
“There is a sense in this question that is obvious to English people, because they are people who have been here and have lived here forever,” Appiah says, breaking another social taboo that has deep meaning for those who claim it and it causes him unspeakable pain when it is denied. “It is new, I think, for many Englishmen to learn that, in the XNUMXth century, Jews came and went without any problems. It is forgotten that the Danelaw (a territory controlled by the Vikings or Dani) extended over much of northern England and that England was ruled for a long time by people who spoke a Norse language.
“They forget that the Romans left all kinds of traces, that the Normans arrived in significant numbers and that people from England went to Normandy. They forget that, in fact, there is more mixing here than elsewhere. Raising his voice a bit, Appiah adds: “This mixture was not perceived because most of the people who came to the British Isles weren't dark-skinned. So the trace of their ancestry is not evident on people's faces."
There is no way to deny that Englishness exists, even if most people's understanding is ahistorical in nature. “There are some lies, but there's nothing wrong with letting them go,” he says. “When if you live your life and use identities… an intellectual [who] keeps criticizing and researching details is not helpful.
“However, whatever their religion, sexuality, racial identity or nationality,” people should have a lighter hand in using these identity categories so that at times when conflicts arise in our cultures, they can somehow be defused”.
Just saying that, he says, could be provocative. “Because people care about their identity, you can build a bridge to make them take it a little less seriously than they do, but there's always the risk of a backlash.
“But overall I think it needs to be done and I'm ready to do it, and since I think what I'm saying is correcting the dominant view and morally superior to the mainstream viewpoint, I think the more it comes to the surface, the better. .
New York and America
Appiah practices what he preaches. In a family like his, he says, "race is not the main axis of identity because Christian, my oldest nephew, is tall and blond while my first nephew is half Nigerian and darker than me." Being gay was a big factor for him when he was younger; then he wrote long essays defending same-sex marriage.
In 2011, when that moral revolution arrived in New York, he was among its first beneficiaries, along with Henry Finder, editorial director of "The New Yorker" and his partner of more than 25 years. “I realize that there is a lot of homophobia in the world and this interests me as a matter of justice,” he says about it. “One reason I'm not too worried about gay identity is that there isn't a lot of homophobia in the world I live in.”
Being American, however, is something Appiah takes very seriously. This is the country he has chosen. As a writer he has tried to influence her. Like a sort of intellectual Maria de Filippi – he writes a weekly column in the New York Times called “The Ethicist” – he offers advice to readers who write to the New York newspaper. (“Can my cat go outside if he bullies other cats?” one reader asked. Appiah's response, more or less, was: “It depends.”) “I think of myself as an intellectual,” he says. – as someone whose main vocation is to try to understand things and explain them to their fellow citizens.
He taught at the most prestigious universities in the United States including Yale, Harvard and Princeton, before moving in 2014 to the philosophy department of New York University, where he has remained. Spending a year in the United States, when he was in his early twenties and still a university student in Cambridge (UK), was not an obvious choice. “He IS racist and he is dangerous, people are attacked all the time”, he was told. “I absorbed all these stereotypes through Kojak… I grew up reading Richard Wright [the African-American author whose writings have exposed the country's entrenched racism], who actually came to visit my family when I was a kid in Ghana.”
African American Studies and the Landing a Ybut by
In Britain, his work had focused on a few subjects that attracted the attention of just a few hundred professional philosophers. To earn a living, he began teaching African-American studies classes, thus becoming aware of the raw resentment of a group of outraged people still fighting to assert their rights.
He had approached this subject with the eye of an outsider and the rigor of a logician. He was more willing than some American historians to delve into oral history. “Reading transcribed material from interviews with uneducated people was not their research idea,” Appiah says. "Obviously if you ask former slaves to talk about slavery, you get a different picture than if you read the official archives."
Back in Great Britain, after a year in the USA, he worked on a dissertation entitled Conditions for Conditions – “a work that did not find a publisher, despite being a profound reflection on philosophical logic” he specifies – which left him embittered by its lack of diffusion. Then came a pause. “Yale offered me… – he corrects himself – … they were looking for an expert in philosophy and African-American studies and there weren't many people who could be considered for this position. So I applied and got the role." It has been six years since Appiah received national recognition for the humanities from Barack Obama on the grounds that he sought "eternal truths in the contemporary world." Since then, the first black president of the United States has been the target of racial slurs that there are "much better people" among whites. Is it still realistic to hope that Americans might not care so much about divisive social identities?
Identity and freedom
Appiah thinks we should have a lighter hand in using identity categories. Trump lost the popular vote. A poll taken in June 2018 showed that more Americans think immigration is a good thing than we did when Trump took office. Cities like Atlanta, New York and San Francisco are among the most diverse in the world and their populations are growing. “If I lived in rural Minnesota, I might be… – he seems about to say – pessimistic,” or something like that, but he stops. Minnesota college campuses, he notes, are “full of six-foot-tall blonde female students with Norwegian and Swedish ancestry, but there are also a lot of Ghanaian girls and they all seem perfectly comfortable with that situation.”
His ultimate reason for the optimism, however, seems more like a concession. Accepting that other people have different ways in life could also mean that some of these people don't accept yours. The Amish send their children away at 16, he notes, so they can decide for themselves whether to choose the closed community of their youth or the outside world. While this doesn't always go down well for children ill-prepared for this immersion, the practice makes the Amish "a paradigm of freedom, though one might think a bizarre thing to say."
Even in Appiah's rarefied circle there are people whose interests are narrow-minded and parochial. The queen mother of Ashanti, an exceptional source for the tabloid magazines, had no interest in what went on outside her circle. “It's fine for me – says Appiah -. In fact, it seems strange to be told that it's fine with me, but it's none of my business."
The modern world, he says, wants a confrontation between cultures: “I'm optimistic that there will be enough. We are not asking everyone to be cosmopolitan; it would be too little cosmopolitan.”
This article contains an account of the conversation Mark Vandevelde, the US correspondent of the Financial Times, had with Kwame Anthony Appiah on the occasion of the release of his latest book The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, available on Amazon. The piece was featured in the Financial Times weekend supplement, Life & Arts.
