Kwame Anthony Appiah

Scholar and author
October 7, 2002    4:00 pm   Gaston Hall

Kwame Anthony Appiah was recently named as the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Before joining the Princeton faculty, Professor Appiah held faculty positions at Harvard, Duke, Cornell, and Yale universities. He is the author of the award-winning books Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (with Amy Gutmann) and In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. He has also published monographs in the philosophy of language and three novels. He is co-editor, with Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience and the Encarta Africana CD-Rom. His current projects include a second set of Tanner lecturers in Human Values and an annotated edition of 7,500 proverbs from his homeland, on which he collaborated with his mother.

On Being Oneself

Many people assume racial identities are essentially morally irrelevant. They matter now because we have a history of racial discrimination, insult and domination, and those wrongs need restitution. They matter, that is, not in themselves but because other people have wrongly made them a basis of action. Once we have recovered sufficiently from that history, however, it will be at least irrational and at worst immoral to continue to use racial identities as a basis for differential treatment. More than this, if we distinguish between morality-which has to do with how we should treat others-and ethics, which has to do with the normative issues that arise in deciding how we should each make our own lives, racial identities will not only be morally irrelevant, they will be ethically irrelevant as well. I used to assume something like this. But I have come to think that there are arguments for a different view, one in which racial identities or, at any rate, their successors will continue to be usable in our ethical lives. And, I think, if that is so, then they will matter for morality, too; especially for political morality. What I want to do today is to sketch some of the arguments that that second view. I will begin by talking about the nature of racial identity, especially as it relates to black identities in the circum-Atlantic world. It is these black identities-or this black identity, if you prefer-that I will use in my exploration of these questions today. But if my general claim is right, you will see that it might be adapted to defenses of gender, nationality and other forms of identity as well.