What Makes Us and What We Make: Kwame Anthony Appiah on the Mutability of Identity and the Limiting Lens of Cultural Appropriation

“We are denizens of an age in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.”

“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote in his superb investigation of what he termed “the genes of the soul,” “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react...