Mixed Race Studies

Reflections: An Anthology of African-American Philosophy, 1st Edition

Cengage Learning
2000
464 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0534573932  ISBN-13: 9780534573935

Edited by:

James Montmarquet, Professor of Philosophy
Tennessee State University

William Hardy, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Tennessee State University

This anthology provides the instructor with a sufficient quantity, breadth, and diversity of materials to be the sole text for a course on African-American philosophy. It includes both classic and more contemporary readings by both professional philosophers and other people with philosophically intriguing viewpoints. The material provided is diverse, yet also contains certain themes which instructors can effectively employ to achieve the element of unity. One such theme, the debate of the “nationalist” focus on blackness vs. the many critics of this focus, runs through a great number of issues and readings.

Table of Contents

• Preface.
• Introduction.
• PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS-RACE AND RACISM.
  • 1. W.E.B. DuBois: From The Souls of Black Folk.
  • 2. Molefi K. Asante: Racism, Consciousness, and Afrocentricity.
  • 3. Kwame Anthony Appiah: Racisms.
  • 4. J. L. A. Garcia: The Heart of Racisms. Contemporary Issue: Views on “Mixed Race”.
  • 5. Naomi Zack: Mixed Black and White Race and Public Policy.
  • 6. Lewis R. Gordon: Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race-In Theory.
• PART TWO: MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY-NATIONALISM, SEPARATISM, AND ASSIMILATION.
  • 7. Martin R. Delaney: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored Peoples of the United States.
  • 8. Frederick Douglass: The Future of the Negro, The Future of the Colored Race, The Nation’s Problem, and On Colonization.
  • 9. Marcus Garvey: From Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.
  • 10. Maulana Karenga: The Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles): Their Meaning and Message.
  • 11. Molefi K. Asante: The Afrocentric Idea in Education.
  • 12. Cornel West: The Four Traditions of Response. Contemporary Issue: “Ebonics”.
  • 13. Geneva Smitherman: Black English/Ebonics: What it Be Like?
  • 14. Milton Baxter: Educating Teachers about Educating the Oppressed. Feminism, Womanism, and Gender Relations.
  • 15. Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman?
  • 16. Patricia Hill Collins: The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.
  • 17. bell hooks: Reflections on Race and Sex.
  • 18. Angela P. Harris: Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory.
  • 19. Charles W. Mills: Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women? Contemporary Issue: Women’s Rights and Black Nationalism.
  • 20. E. Francis White: Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counterdiscourse, and African American Nationalism.
  • 21. Amiri Baraka: Black Woman. Violence, Liberation, and Social Justice.
  • 22. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
  • 23. Malcolm X: Message to the Grass Roots.
  • 24. Howard McGary: Psychological Violence, Physical Violence, and Racial Oppression.
  • 25. Laurence M. Thomas: Group Autonomy and Narrative Identity. Contemporary Issue: Affirmative Action.
  • 26. Bernard Boxill: Affirmative Action.
  • 27. Shelby Steele: Affirmative Action. Ethics and Value Theory.
  • 28. Alain Locke: Values and Imperatives.
  • 29. Michele M. Moody-Adams: Race, Class, and the Social Construction of Self-Respect.
  • 30. Laurence M. Thomas: Friendship.
  • 31. Cornel West: Nihilism in Black America.
  • 32. Katie G. Cannon: Unctuousness as a Virtue: According to the Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary Issue: A Classic Question of Values, Rights, and Education.
  • 33. Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address.
  • 34. W.E.B. DuBois: The Talented Tenth.
• PART THREE: PHILOSOPHY AND RELATED DISCIPLINES.
  • 35. Patricia J. Williams: Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights.
  • 36. Regina Austin: Sapphire Bound!
  • 37. Derrick Bell: Racial Realism-After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Post-Racial Epoch.
  • 38. John Arthur: Critical Race Theory: A Critique. Contemporary Issue: Racist Hate Speech.
  • 39. Charles Lawrence and Gerald Gunther: Prohibiting Racist Speech: A Debate. Aesthetics.
  • 40. James Baldwin: Everybody’s Protest Novel.
  • 41. Larry Neal: The Black Arts Movement.
  • 42. Angela Y. Davis: Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”: Music and Social Consciousness.
  • 43. Ralph Ellison: Blues People. Contemporary Issue: Rap Music.
  • 44. Crispin Sartwell: Rap Music and the Uses of Stereotype.
  • 45. Kimberle Crenshaw: Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew. Philosophy and Theology.
  • 46. David Walker: David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United stated.
  • 47. James H. Cone: God and Black Theology.
  • 48. Victor Anderso: Ontological Blackness in Theology.
  • 49. Anthony Pinn: Alternative Perspectives and Critiques. Contemporary Issue: Womanist Theology and the Traditionalist Black Church.
  • 50. Cheryl J. Sanders: Christian Ethics and Theology in a Womanist Perspective.
  • 51. Delores Williams: Womanist Reflections on “the Black Church,” the African-American Denominational Churches and the Universal Hagar’s Spiritual Church.
• SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING.

Mixed Race Britain – How The World Got Mixed Up

BBC Press Office: Press Packs
2011-09-05

Ruth Williams, Seretse Khama and family

This one-off documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing.

Throughout modern history, interracial sex has been one of society’s great taboos, and across many parts of the world, mixed race relationships have been subjected to a range of deterrents. Mixed couples have endured shame, stigma and persecution and many have risked the threat of ostracism from their friends and families.

In several parts of the world, including South Africa during the apartheid era, governments introduced legislation to prohibit race mixing. Laws against race mixing were still in force in 16 American states until they were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court’s verdict in the Loving v Virginia case of 1967.

Yet despite the social and legal constraints–and the even more violent extra-judicial attempts to discourage race mixing organised by extreme nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan–interracial relationships have been an ever-present feature of societies throughout modern times.

Through the stories of interracial relationships which created scandals in their own time–including the liaisons between the East India Company’s James Achilles Kirkpatrick and the Muslim princess Khair un-Nissa at the beginning of the 19th Century, and the romance of the Botswanan royal Seretse Khama and the middle-class British girl Ruth Williams in the years after the Second World War–the film examines the complex history of interracial relationships and chronicles the shifts in attitudes that for centuries have created controversy and anxiety all around the world.

Contributors to this film include the former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn; who founded the Seretse Khama Defence Council; and the esteemed moral philosopher Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose mother Peggy Cripps–the daughter of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps married his father, the Ghanaian political activist Joe Appiah in 1953.

Toward a Philosophy of Race in Education

University of Tennessee, Knoxville
May 2011
221 pages

Corey V. Kittrell

A Dissertation Presented for the Doctorate of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

There is a tendency in education theory to place the focus on the consequences of racial hegemony (racism, Eurocentric education, low performance by racial minorities) and ignore that race is antecedent to these consequences. This dissertation explores the treatment of race within critical theory in education. I conduct a metaphysical analysis to examine the race concept as it emerges from the works of various critical theorists in education. This examination shows how some scholars affirm the scientifically discredited race concept by offering racial essentialist approaches for emancipatory education. I argue that one of consequences of these approaches is the further tightening of racial constraints on the student’s personal autonomy. This mandates that critical theorists gain a deeper understanding of race as a problem, conceptually, epistemically, ideologically, and existentially. I argue that critical theorists of education draw from work conducted in the philosophy of race by theorists such as K. Anthony Appiah, Jorge Gracia, Charles Mills, and Naomi Zack to gain insights on the metaphysics of race to better inform theory and praxis. I further recommend the creation of a critical philosophy of race in education to address and combat race as a problem and its consequences. I contend that the groundwork for philosophy of race in education must entail strategies that encourage and assist theorists and teachers to move toward the elimination of the race in society, while utilizing race only as heuristic tool to address its consequences. Additionally, I argue that a philosophy of race in education must advocate for an education for autonomy as a means to racial liberation for students.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER I
  • Introduction
    • Theoretical Perspective
    • Objects of Investigation
    • Descriptive Analysis of Critical Theory in Education
    • Normative Analysis
    • The Philosophy of Race
    • Toward A Philosophy of Race in Education
• CHAPTER II
  • The Problem of Reification in Critical Theory in Education
    • The Process of Reification
    • The Problem of Reification
    • The Problem of Reification in Critical Theory in Education
      • Critical Race Theory: Race and Culturally Relevant Teaching
      • Afrocentricity In Education: Constructing Diasporas
      • Critical Multiculturalism: Race and Affirmation
      • Politicizing The Racial Binary
    • Conclusion
• CHAPTER III
  • Historical Underpinnings of the Problem of Reification in Critical Theory in Education
    • The Hampton Approach
    • Liberal Education
    • New Black Intelligentsia
      • W.E.B. DuBois
      • Carter G. Woodson
    • Black Power and Black Studies
    • The History of Black Education and Critical Theory: A Synthesis
    • Conclusion
• CHAPTER IV
  • Critical Theory in Education and the Problem of Race
    • Race as an Axiomatic System.
    • Autonomy and the Black Individual
    • Autonomy and the Black Social Self
    • Engaging the Problem of Race in Critical Theory in Education
    • Conclusion
• CHAPTER V
  • The Philosophy of Race
    • Theoretical Positions within the Philosophy of Race
    • The Problem of Race
      • Charles S. Mills
      • Kwame Anthony Appiah
      • Naomi Zack
    • Race and Identity
      • Mills on Racial Identity
      • Zack on Mixed Race Identity
      • Appiah on Racial Identity
      • Jorge Gracia on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity
    • Racialism, Racism, and White Supremacy.
    • Philosophy of Race and Education
    • Conclusion
• CHAPTER VI
  • Toward a Philosophy of Race in Education
    • Introduction: A Critical Philosophy of Race in Education
    • Eliminativist and Anti-Eliminativist Arguments
      • Arguments for Racial Eliminativism
      • Anti-Eliminativist Arguments
    • Education for Autonomy as Liberatory
      • A Liberatory Role for Reason in a Philosophy of Race in Education
      • A Liberatory Role for Knowledge in a Philosophy of Race in Education
    • Toward a Philosophy of Race of Education
    • Conclusion: Toward A Philosophy of Race For Education
• CHAPTER VII
  • Conclusion
• LIST OF REFERENCES
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

Appiah’s Uncompleted Argument: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Reality of Race

Social Theory and Practice
Volume 26, Number 1 (Spring 2000)
pages 103-128

Paul C. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

For people concerned by philosophy’s reputation for ivory-tower isolation, K. Anthony Appiah’s work on race is one of the more encouraging developments to come along in some time. Appiah has contributed greatly to making one of the messier and more contentious public issues of our time into an acceptable subject of English-language philosophical inquiry. And having launched his project by taking W.E.B. Du Bois as one of his principal interlocutors, he has also helped rescue an important American social theorist from the shadows of philosophical neglect.

As it happens, Appiah ushers Du Bois into the light mainly to make visible what appear to him to be blemishes. We can see this, and we can see why, from the title of one of the essays that mark Appiah’s inception of the project: “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race.”(1) Du Bois was a racialist: he believed that races are real entities, that racial identities are real and valuable properties of human individuals, and that racial solidarity can help realize such human goods as equality and self-actualization. He accepted, of course, the testimony of the physical sciences, building even in his day toward the conclusion that races are not useful posits for the physical sciences; but he nevertheless insisted that race exists, as a phenomenon that is “clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist.”(2) Appiah, by contrast, is what we might call a racial eliminativist. He believes that races do not exist, that acting as if they do is metaphysically indefensible and morally dangerous, and, as a result, that eliminating “race” from our metaphysical vocabularies is an important step toward the right, or a better–that is to say, a rational and just–world-view.

A number of commentators have taken issue with Appiah’s treatment of Du Bois’s, or of Du Boisian, sociohistorical racialism.(3) Unfortunately, neither Appiah nor his critics seem to have noticed a fairly straightforward way of reading Du Bois’s argument, a way that leads to a similarly straightforward refutation of the metaphysical underpinnings for Appiah’s eliminativism–a way that it is one of the burdens of this essay to make clear. I’m interested in the metaphysics of Appiah’s eliminativism because he says often enough that we should stop talking about race on pain of various sorts of moral error, but he argues mainly that we should stop talking about race because there’s no such thing. He makes his way to his eliminativist conclusion as Peirce suggests: by weaving different strands of argument into, as it were, “a cable whose fibres … are … numerous and intimately connected,” rather than by producing a single chain of reasoning “which is no stronger than its weakest link.”(4) But the metaphysical “strand” does most of the work, does it badly, and gets away with it because of its entanglement with broadly plausible ethical claims that are too poorly developed to stand on their own.

In this essay I will construct the alternative readings of Du Bois and Appiah that I have in mind. I am concerned to do so not, or not principally, because of some abstract interest in clearing the ontological ground. My concern derives from the concrete worry that Appiah’s metaphysical sleight-of-hand obscures the need for a real debate about the merits of racialized and race-based practices and institutions. My sense is that once we quit kicking up the dust with arguments about the alleged non-existence of race, we’ll be able to see how much work remains to be done on the ethics of racial identification. That is: Once we recognize that there are eminently sensible routes to the claim that races do exist, perhaps we’ll recognize also that worries about the prudence and permissibility of appealing to race ought to be explicated and addressed in those terms. It is not enough simply to gesture at moral concerns while using metaphysics to avoid moral argument.

I will begin in sections 2 and 3 by examining the argument that Appiah develops in the second chapter of his important book, In My Father’s House.(5) His claim there is that Du Bois’s allegedly sociohistorical racialism ultimately relies on a more or less garden-variety biological notion of race. My counterclaim on Du Bois’s behalf is that Appiah manages this reading only by seizing upon perhaps the least plausible ways of rendering a few rather crucial details and by manufacturing perplexity in the face of a patently non-vicious circularity.

In section 4, I take a moment to sketch the kind of account that I take Du Bois to have been groping for. Then in sections 5 and 6, I consider the argument that Appiah develops in his contribution to the prize-winning book, Color-Conscious.(6) In “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” he uses conceptual analysis to argue that race-talk necessarily involves an untoward commitment to biological racialism. Unfortunately for the eliminativist cause, this argument pre-supposes the success of the earlier attempt to unmask Du Bois as a biological racialist, and eventually gets mired in metaphysical vacillation. Appiah does go on to gesture at the ethical concerns that motivate his inquiry, but, as we’ll see, without their metaphysical accompaniment these gestures don’t get him very far…

Read the entire article here.

The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race

Critical Inquiry
Volume 12, Number 1, “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Autumn, 1985)
pages 21-37

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy
Princeton University

Introduction

Contemporary biologists are not agreed on the question of whether there are any human races, despite the widespread scientific consensus on the underlying genetics. For most purposes, however, we can reasonably treat this issue as terminological. What most people in most cultures ordinarily believe about the significance of “racial” difference is quite remote, I think, from what the biologists are agreed on. Every reputable biologist will agree that human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those populations; though how much greater depends, in part, on the measure of genetic variability the biologist chooses. If biologists want to make interracial difference seem relatively large, they can say that “the proportion of genic variation attributable to racial differences is … 9-11%.”‘ If they want to make it seem small, they can say that, for two people who are both Caucasoid, the chances of difference in genetic constitution at one site on a given chromosome are currently estimated at about 14.3 percent, while for any two people taken at random from the human population, they are estimated at about 14.8 percent. (I will discuss why this is considered a measure of genetic difference in section 2.) The statistical facts about the distribution of variant characteristics in human populations and subpopulations are the same, whichever way the matter is expressed. Apart from the visible morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone, by which we are inclined to assign people to the broadest racial categories—in the population of England that are not found in similar proportions in Zaire or in China; and few too (though more) which are found in Zaire but not in similar proportions in China or in England. All this, I repeat, is part of the consensus (see “GR,” pp. 1-59). A more familiar part of the consensus is that the differences between peoples in language, moral affections, aesthetic attitudes, or political ideology—those differences which most deeply affect us in our dealings with each other—are not biologically determined to any significant degree.

These claims will, no doubt, seem outrageous to those who confuse the question of whether biological difference accounts for our differences with the question of whether biological similarity accounts for our similarities. Some of our similarities as human beings in these broadly cultural respects—the capacity to acquire human languages, for example, or, more specifically, the ability to smile—are to a significant degree biologically determined. We can study the biological basis of these cultural capacities and give biological explanations of our exercise of them. But if biological difference between human beings is unimportant in these explanations – and it is-then racial difference, as a species of biological difference, will not matter either.

In this essay, I want to discuss the way in which W. E. B. Du Bois—who called his life story the “autobiography of a race concept”—came gradually, though never completely, to assimilate the unbiological nature of races. I have made these few prefatory remarks partly because it is my experience that the biological evidence about race is not sufficiently known and appreciated but also because they are important in discussing Du Bois. Throughout his life, Du Bois was concerned not just with the meaning of race but with the truth about it. We are more inclined at present, however, not to express our understanding of the intellectual development of people and cultures as a movement toward the truth; I shall sketch some of the reasons for this at the end of the essay. I will begin, therefore, by saying what I think the rough truth is about race, because, against the stream, I am disposed to argue that this struggle toward the truth is exactly what we find in the life of Du Bois, who can claim, in my view, to have thought longer, more engagedly, and more publicly about race than any other social theorist of our century…

Read the entire article here.

“A tree, whatever the circumstances, does not become a legume, a vine, or a cow,” explains Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Ethics Of Identity. “The reasonable middle view is that constructing an identity is a good thing (if self-authorship is a good thing) but that the identity must make some kind of sense. And for it to make sense, it must be an identity constructed in response to facts outside oneself, things that are beyond one’s own choices.”

A society in which “Cablinasian” makes sense has yet to be created. Like a Rwanda full of Hutsis [Hutu/Tutsi], it exists only in the imagination. That does not necessarily mean that such a society could not or should not emerge. But “the facts beyond one’s own choice” do not yet allow it. Identities may be constructed and can be built differently. But we can only work with the materials available.

Gary Younge, “Tiger Woods: Black, white, other,” The Guardian. May 29, 2010.

Blackness, Hypodescent, and Essentialism: Commentary on McPherson and Shelby’s “Blackness and Blood”

Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy
Volume 1, Number 1, May 2005

Gregory Velazco y Trianosky, Professor of Philosopy
California State University, Northridge

In their fascinating and thoughtful paper, McPherson and Shelby seek to defend everyday African American understandings of their own identity against the critique launched by Anthony Appiah in his Tanner lectures. I have no deep disagreements with their defense. Instead I will propose what I hope are useful clarifications of some of the key claims in that defense, and perhaps some further contribution to the discussion they have begun.

1. Roughly speaking, Appiah argues as follows: (1) African Americans typically adhere to the rule of hypodescent, understood as a criterion for membership in the group of black people. However, says Appiah, in conjunction with (2) the nationalist belief that black people owe special obligations of support or group solidarity to other black people, this adherence is problematic. For the truth is that (3) many phenotypically white people in the United States in fact have black ancestors and thus, by a strict application of the rule of hypodescent, are black rather than white, regardless of appearance. Given this fact, (4) adherence to the rule of hypodescent requires black people (insofar as they are nationalists) to extend to many phenotypically white people the same kind of support they believe they owe to all black people. But this means (5) that the actions of black nationalists will, insofar as they are based on the facts, undermine the very project of black nationalism. Appiah goes on to argue that in cases where a group’s beliefs about its identity undermine its own political and social projects, the liberal state should intervene to “soul-make,” that is, to reshape the understanding that group has of itself…

Read the entire commentary here.

Tiger Woods: Black, white, other

The Guardian
2010-05-29

Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

Before he was engulfed in a sex scandal Tiger Woods was a poster boy for a multiracial America. Gary Younge on the real legacy of golf’s fallen hero

On 13 April 1997 Tiger Woods putted his way to golfing history in Augusta, Georgia. The fact that he was the first black winner of the US Masters was not even half of it. At 21, he was the youngest; with a 12-stroke lead, he was the most emphatic; and finishing 18 under par, he was, quite simply, the best the world had ever seen.

…But within a fortnight of black America gaining a new sporting hero, it seemed as though they had lost him again. From the revered perch of Oprah Winfrey’s couch, Woods was asked whether it bothered him being termed “African-American”. “It does,” he said. “Growing up, I came up with this name: I’m a ‘Cablinasian’.”

Woods is indeed a rich mix of racial and ethnic heritage. His father, Earl, was of African-American, Chinese and Native American descent. His mother, Kutilda, is of Thai, Chinese and Dutch descent. “Cablinasian” was a composite of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. When he was asked to fill out forms in school, he would tick African-American and Asian. “Those are the two I was raised under and the only two I know,” he told Oprah. “I’m just who I am … whoever you see in front of you.”…

…In 1998, the American Anthropological Association declared, “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (eg DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic ‘racial’ groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means there is greater genetic variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them.” In short, we really are more alike than we are unalike. If race is an arbitrary fiction, then “race-mixing” is a conceptual absurdity. To the extent to which “mixed race” makes any sense at all, we are all mixed race…

…Economically and politically, all of this made perfect sense. Intellectually, it was and remains a nonsense. As Barbara J. Fields pointed out in her landmark essay Ideology And Race In American History, it meant that “a black woman cannot give birth to a white child” while “a white woman [is] capable of giving birth to a black child”…

…Similarly, those who insist that, because Barack Obama has a white mother and grandmother who raised him, he could just as easily be described as another white president as the first black president are in a losing battle with credibility. “Obama’s chosen to identify as an African-American male,” explains Jennifer Nobles, the campaigner for multiracialism. “It’s the same thing with Halle Berry. That’s their choice and it makes sense. But he could identify as white. The trouble is no one would receive it that way.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mapping Identity – Opening Lecture by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Haverford University
KINSC Sharpless Auditorium
2010-03-19 16:00 EDT (Local Time)

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy
Princeton University

Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery presents Mapping Identity, curated by Carol Solomon, Visiting Associate Professor, and Janet Yoon, HC ’10. The show will run Friday, March 19 – Friday, April 30, 2010, with an opening reception Friday, March 19, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Gallery.

Opening Lecture – Kwame Anthony Appiah
Called a post-modern Socrates, Kwame Anthony Appiah asks profound questions about identity and ethics in a world where the sands of race, ethnicity, religion and nationalism continue to realign and reform before our eyes. His seminal book Cosmopolitanism is a moral manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering. In intellectually stimulating language, Appiah challenges you to look beyond the boundaries — real and imagined — that divide us, and to see our common humanity…

For more information, click here.

The Ethics of Identity

Princeton University Press
2004
384 pages
6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 9780691120362
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4008-2619
e-Book ISBN: 978-1-4008-2619-3

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the Center for Human Values
Princeton University

• A New York Times Editors’ Choice
• One of Amazon.com’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005
• Winner of the 2005 Award for Excellence in Professional/Scholarly Publishing in Philosophy, Association of American Publishers
• Honorable Mention for the 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights

Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do “identities” constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? In this beautifully written work, renowned philosopher and African Studies scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions.

The Ethics of Identity takes seriously both the claims of individuality–the task of making a life—and the claims of identity, these large and often abstract social categories through which we define ourselves.

What sort of life one should lead is a subject that has preoccupied moral and political thinkers from Aristotle to Mill. Here, Appiah develops an account of ethics, in just this venerable sense–but an account that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances, our individuality with our identities. As he observes, the question who we are has always been linked to the question what we are.

Adopting a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, Appiah takes aim at the clichés and received ideas amid which talk of identity so often founders. Is “culture” a good? For that matter, does the concept of culture really explain anything? Is diversity of value in itself? Are moral obligations the only kind there are? Has the rhetoric of “human rights” been overstretched? In the end, Appiah’s arguments make it harder to think of the world as divided between the West and the Rest; between locals and cosmopolitans; between Us and Them. The result is a new vision of liberal humanism–one that can accommodate the vagaries and variety that make us human.

Table of Contents

• PREFACE
• Chapter One: The Ethics of Individuality
  • THE GREAT EXPERIMENT—LIBERTY AND INDIVIDUALITY—PLANS OF LIFE–THE SOUL OF THE SERVITOR—SOCIAL CHOICES—INVENTION AND AUTHENTICITY—THE SOCIAL SCRIPTORIUM—ETHICS IN IDENTITY—INDIVIDUALITY AND THE STATE—THE COMMON PURSUIT
• Chapter Two: Autonomy and Its Critics
  • WHAT AUTONOMY DEMANDS—AUTONOMY AS INTOLERANCE—AUTONOMY AGONISTES—THE TWO STANDPOINTS—AGENCY AND THE INTERESTS OF THEORY
• Chapter Three: The Demands of Identity
  • LEARNING HOW TO CURSE—THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL IDENTITIES—MILLET MULTICULTURALISM—AUTONOMISM, PLURALISM, NEUTRALISM—A FIRST AMENDMENT EXAMPLE: THE ACCOMMODATIONIST PROGRAM—NEUTRALITY RECONSIDERED—THE LANGUAGE OF RECOGNITION—THE MEDUSA SYNDROME—LIMITS AND PARAMETERS
• Chapter Four: The Trouble with Culture
  • MAKING UP THE DIFFERENCE—IS CULTURE A GOOD?—THE PRESERVATIONIST ETHIC—NEGATION AS AFFIRMATION— THE DIVERSITY PRINCIPLE
• Chapter Five: Soul Making
  • SOULS AND THE STATE—THE SELF-MANAGEMENT CARD—RATIONAL WELL-BEING—IRRATIONAL IDENTITIES—SOUL MAKING AND STEREOTYPES—EDUCATED SOULS—CONFLICTS OVER IDENTITY CLAIMS
• Chapter Six: Rooted Cosmopolitanism
  • A WORLDWIDE WEB–RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITANS–ETHICAL PARTIALITY–TWO CONCEPTS OF OBLIGATION–COSMOPOLITAN PATRIOTISM–CONFRONTATION AND CONVERSATION–RIVALROUS GOODS, RIVALROUS GODS–TRAVELING TALES–GLOBALIZING HUMAN RIGHTS–COSMOPOLITAN CONVERSATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX