Is Race Real? How Does Identity Matter?

As he leaves Harvard for Princeton, K. Anthony Appiah's scholarship takes a new direction Danny Postel The Chronicle of Higher Education April 5, 2002 People who talk about Kwame Anthony Appiah tend to effuse. "He is the smartest person I've ever met," says Henry Louis Gates Jr. "He is the major scholar working on issues of identity and multiculturalism," says Amy Gutmann, provost of Princeton University. A man of "daunting" erudition, his work is "brave, lucid, acute, and temperate," the novelist Norman Rush has written. The author of everything from monographs on the philosophy of language to mystery novels to essays on African literature; the editor of poetry anthologies and encyclopedias of cultural history; and a speaker of four languages, Mr. Appiah is an interdisciplinarian par excellence, a cosmopolitan thinker whose subject is nothing less than the world. His most famous book is a collection of essays on race, culture, and identity called In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1992). Virtually an instant classic, it is among the most widely discussed academic books of the 1990s on perhaps that decade's most hotly debated topics on campus: race and multiculturalism. And yet Mr. Appiah, a professor of philosophy and African-American studies at Harvard University who will be moving to Princeton in the fall, is perhaps best known, at least to those outside his scholarly fields, for his numerous collaborations with Mr. Gates, whose celebrity is much greater. To some, he's "that other guy" with whom Mr. Gates is constantly assembling volumes, the one with the not-obvious-how-to-pronounce name. (It's AH-pee-uh -- similar to how a Cockney would say "happier," he explains.) Mr. Appiah has been getting less famous, he says, since the day he was born. His parents' marriage, vaunted as the first "modern society" wedding between an African and an Englishwoman, was such a big deal in England, he says, that his birth made front-page news in the British press. That wouldn't be Mr. Appiah's only appearance on the front page, however. This January he landed there again, when The New York Times wrote about his decision to leave Harvard for Princeton. While the announcement came amid the controversy over Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers's dispute with Mr. Appiah's colleague and friend Cornel West, Mr. Appiah told the Times that his decision to leave was motivated by other considerations, notably his desire to be closer to his home in New York. (He now says the decision wasn't entirely unrelated to the "anxiety" over the Summers-West tangle.) His move means not only a new institutional affiliation for Mr. Appiah, but also a chance to strike out in new intellectual directions. And that, he says, includes turning away from the race question that has dominated his work for so long. "After you say 10 years' worth of things about a topic, it's probably time to move along." Intellectual Fortune While Mr. Appiah's scholarly solo efforts are considerable and highly regarded, his 25-year association with Mr. Gates has unquestionably played an enormous role both in shaping much of his work and in bringing it such visibility. Together, the two have edited no fewer than a dozen volumes, including the highly acclaimed Dictionary of Global Culture (Knopf, 1997) and Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (Basic-Civitas, 1999). They have taught together at Yale, Duke, Cornell, and Harvard Universities. They edit the journal Transition. And they are best friends. Mr. Appiah himself attributes much of his good intellectual fortune to the "accident" of meeting Mr. Gates. He recounts the story of their friendship in the living room of the ornate Manhattan apartment he shares with his partner, Henry Finder, an editor at The New Yorker. Messrs. Appiah and Gates met at the University of Cambridge in the 1970s, where Mr. Gates was doing graduate work and Mr. Appiah was an undergraduate majoring in philosophy. Before that meeting, Mr. Appiah had focused very little intellectual attention on the themes of race, culture, and identity that would become central to his work over the next two decades. Which is not to say that he had no interest in those questions -- quite the contrary. He was raised in both his mother's native England and his father's native Ghana. His father, a prominent Ghanaian barrister and politician (and related by marriage to the country's royal family), was deeply involved in the Pan-African movement, an effort to link black struggles throughout the African diaspora. Growing up, Pan-Africanism was "a sort of family business," says Mr. Appiah. He fondly recalls the likes of Richard Wright and C.L.R. James paying visits to the family home when he was a child. Yet it wasn't something he had studied academically. Politics and wealth run on both sides of Mr. Appiah's lineage. His mother hails from a prominent political clan as well, claiming several generations of both Fabian socialists and landed gentry. (His maternal grandfather served in Britain's first postwar Labor government.) Commenting on this "doubly patrician background," John Ryle in The Independent quoted an "admiring don at Cambridge" who once described Mr. Appiah as "la crème de la crème brûlée." Multiple Worlds If Mr. Appiah has inhabited several geographic and cultural worlds -- Ghana, England, the United States -- he has also inhabited several intellectual ones. Trained in the philosophy of language and logic, he wrote his dissertation (and his first two books) in the highly technical areas of probability theory, conditionals, and semantics. Assertion and Conditionals (Cambridge University Press, 1985) and For Truth in Semantics (Blackwell, 1986), his two professional philosophy books, are the fruits of his apprenticeship at Cambridge, the birthplace of the analytic school and home to such giants as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. If that area is utterly foreign to you, you're not alone. Over lunch at an Italian restaurant in Chelsea, the neighborhood in which he lives, this reporter confesses to Mr. Appiah that he has not read the philosopher's technical monographs. "Ha! That makes you and just about everyone else in the world," he says with a hearty laugh. Those monographs established Mr. Appiah's reputation within probabilistic semantics, a relatively esoteric corner of the philosophy of language (a field within a field within a field). His textbook, Necessary Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy (Prentice-Hall, 1989), brought his broad knowledge of the history of philosophy, and his elegant, lucid prose style, to the attention of philosophers generally. An expanded edition will be published next year as Doing Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Oxford). But it was In My Father's House that really made Mr. Appiah's name. A combination of autobiography, intellectual history, cultural criticism, and postcolonial theory, it is among the most widely cited and assigned books in contemporary Africana studies -- a canonical work in a rapidly growing field. This combination -- Mr. Appiah's training in analytic philosophy on the one hand and his attention to questions of culture, race, and identity on the other -- sets his work apart. Philosophers of language generally write about, well, the philosophy of language, not cultural studies or the African diaspora; and among, say, postcolonial theorists and scholars of race, there isn't exactly a preponderance of experts in probabilistic semantics. Who else has published in both Diacritics and Mind, both Critical Inquiry and the Journal of Philosophical Logic? They're disparate intellectual endeavors with little, if anything, to do with one another. Or are they? While the two projects may be light years apart thematically, Mr. Appiah sees a link. His training in logic and the philosophy of language helped him, he says, "to think carefully, to make distinctions." It equipped him with a way of arguing, he says, that "can be applied to almost any question productively." Richard Rorty, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University famous for his criticisms of analytic philosophy, jokes that in making the crossover from semantic theory to questions of broader cultural concern, Mr. Appiah has "overcome his educational disadvantages." In My Father's House is rife with themes, but its core argument is that the very concept of race is false, that race is in fact a construct, a superimposed category that does not correspond to biological reality. The 19th-century idea of dividing the human population into racial groups -- Negroes, Caucasians, Asians, etc. -- was bad science. The genetic diversity within the human population turns out not to be distributed along racial lines. There is more genetic variation within Africa alone than there is in the rest of the world; there is likely to be more in common genetically between a Swede and a Nigerian than between two individuals from Congo. But the idea of race isn't merely bad science, Mr. Appiah argues; it is also morally dangerous. And it isn't only people of European provenance who have bought into the idea of race; many on the receiving end of racial oppression have done so as well. Thus Pan-Africanists and black nationalists have, in their efforts to unite people of African ancestry, often posited a racial "essence," a quality or set of qualities supposed to be shared by all blacks. Such thinking, Mr. Appiah argues, is just as fraudulent as the 19th-century European notion of a racial hierarchy with whites at the top -- and is implicated in that notion's racism, as well. Ten years after the publication of In My Father's House, this critique of racial "essentialism" now seems less than earth-shattering. Among scholars, particularly in the humanities, the argument is so familiar that it's a virtual truism. But Mr. Appiah formulated and composed most of In My Father's House in the 1980s, when such thinking was considerably less common. That's not to say that it is universally accepted. Indeed, among those who find it not only puzzling but problematic are a number of black scholars. Lucius T. Outlaw, chairman of the African-American-studies program at Vanderbilt University and the author of On Race and Philosophy (Routledge, 1996), has said that in denying the existence of race, Mr. Appiah's argument could have the "unintended effect of racial and ethnic cleansing." When Mr. Outlaw made this remark on a panel with Mr. Appiah during a conference at Rutgers University in 1994, Mr. Appiah denounced the remark and stormed out of the room. (Mr. Outlaw followed Mr. Appiah into the hallway and apologized. The two are now on good terms and have nothing but admiring things to say about each other.) Mr. Outlaw's is not the only criticism Mr. Appiah's ideas have occasioned. Writing in the journal Social Theory and Practice, Paul C. Taylor, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, termed Mr. Appiah a "racial eliminativist." He wrote that the "metaphysical strand" of Mr. Appiah's argument -- that race doesn't exist -- is fashioned "badly," while Mr. Appiah's ethical claims are "poorly developed." Writing in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, Nkiru Nzegwu, an associate professor of Africana and art history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, accused Mr. Appiah of "Anglo-Saxon imperialism" and "ideological recolonization." Molefi Kete Asante, a professor of African studies at Temple University, accused Mr. Appiah in the journal Diogenes, of "Eurocentrism" and a "rapprochement with white triumphalism." Mr. Appiah calls such criticisms "one of the features of the contemporary academy I like least," as they "stigmatize ethically someone you disagree with intellectually." As for Mr. Taylor's charge, Mr. Appiah says that if a "racial eliminativist" is "someone who thinks that there are no biological races among current humans, I plead guilty. If, on the other hand, it is someone who thinks that races have no social reality, I plead innocent." Some scholars sense an existential backdrop to the issue Mr. Outlaw poses. For someone of Mr. Appiah's hybrid, transnational, and privileged background, is it perhaps less of a leap to theorize race out of existence than it might be for someone raised in a less ambiguous context, one in which the color line is a defining social force? Mr. Appiah points out that in those parts of Africa in which everyone is black, race is not the organizing principle of people's lives; instead, things like social class, gender, urban versus rural, and tribal affiliation are what divide people. Some wonder, however, what it would mean to say that race doesn't exist in, say, rural Mississippi or segregated Chicago. Kenneth W. Warren, a professor of English and humanities at the University of Chicago and the author of Black and White Strangers (University of Chicago Press, 1993), thinks those critics have it wrong. He says that while such social realities are enormously significant, they do not contradict Mr. Appiah's argument that race has no objective reality. To enumerate the sociological vicissitudes of race, he says, demonstrates the various ways in which it is constructed, but lends no credence to the idea that there are intrinsic racial properties or essences. Other scholars agree, and they praise Mr. Appiah's work. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author of The Ordeal of Integration (Civitas/Counterpoint, 1998), hailed In My Father's House as "a major intellectual event" and a "desperately needed antidote" to the "resurgent chauvinism" that "threatens to replace clear, hard thinking about the condition of black peoples in Africa and the Americas." The timing of In My Father's House gave it an acute poignancy, says Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of history and Africana studies at New York University and the author of Race Rebels (Free Press, 1994). With multiculturalism at its zenith in the early 1990s, Mr. Appiah "contested multiculturalism's racial and ethnic notion of identity," which Mr. Kelley calls a "zoological" approach (blacks in this cage, Latinos in that one, South Asians in another). Mr. Kelley tells a story about Mr. Appiah's own identity. The two were having lunch at an Indian restaurant one afternoon. When Mr. Appiah asked the waitress about a dessert on the menu, she reacted with annoyed incredulity. "You know," she said impatiently, taking Mr. Appiah, on the basis of his appearance, to be Indian, and assuming his question to be an attempt to pass as non-Indian. "He was living out some of the complications of his own argument," says Mr. Kelley. Mr. Appiah did not correct her. A Rooted Cosmopolitan That sense of identity as fluid, as complex, as syncretic, is fundamental to Mr. Appiah's intellectual project. But while one thrust of his work is to challenge received notions of identity, he affirms an identity that is not just cosmopolitan and universal but rooted and particular. He aims therefore, to avoid the "twin pitfalls of parochialism and false universality." A tricky balancing act, indeed. He says he has tried to follow his father's example. In an essay titled "Cosmopolitan Patriots," he talks about his father's simultaneous love for Ghana, his commitment to a nonchauvinist Pan-Africanism, his Christian humanism, and his internationalism. In a letter to his children Mr. Appiah's father exhorted them to "remember that you are citizens of the world." Mr. Appiah's move from Harvard to Princeton isn't the only recent change in his life: After 20 years in the United States, the citizen of the world recently became a U.S. citizen, so that he could finally vote. His work, too, will take a more political turn, focusing less on racial identity and more on identity's ethical and political dimensions. "I have spent 20 years thinking about race as a form of identity, and it is only one case," he says, "a misleading model for some other cases" of identity. He plans to explore how identity matters for ethical and political life -- when liberal democracies, for example, should think of their citizens "as women and men, as members of identity groups, as mere individuals, and the like." Princeton, he says, is "the perfect place" for him to teach. He will split his time between the multidisciplinary Center for Human Values and the philosophy department, widely regarded as one of the top analytic departments in the country. (He also hopes to do more fiction writing. His mystery novels -- he's published three -- are far from highbrow, he says, though one of them does feature a Wittgenstein scholar at Cambridge.) For all of his intellectual accomplishments and his passion for the life of the mind, Mr. Appiah believes there is a vital need to do more than just theorize and argue. "We cannot change the world," he writes, "simply by evidence and reasoning." And yet, he adds, "we can surely not change it without them, either."