The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

That’s because one of the central human goods is respect: both self-respect and the respect of others. Respect, at its most general, involves a positive attitude to a person, which is elicited by something about them—that’s why we speak of “due respect.” Understanding a society’s codes entails grasping what kinds of facts about people are seen to entitle them to this positive attitude and to the corresponding forms of “respectful” treatment. In social life, one central form of respect is the deference that we grant people whose identities give them a higher social standing than ours: and this deference is at the heart of systems of social class like those I’ve known in Asante, in England, and in the United States. Class involves a system of status and rights to respect associated with the family you were born into. Because honor is fundamentally a matter of socially ascribed rights to respect, class, in its earliest forms, was critically about the distribution of honor as a birthright.