The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

This question has, I suggest, only one serious answer: a nation is a group of people who think of themselves as sharing ancestry and also care about the fact that they have that supposed ancestry in common. To be a nation, it is not enough to meet an objective condition of common descent; you have to meet a subjective condition, a condition that lies in the hearts and minds of its members. (And,

A third now looms. For living side by side with Akan people are people of other ancestries. There are Guan people, for example, whose ancestors migrated to Ghana perhaps a millennium ago. The logic of shared ancestry offers only three possible answers: annihilate them, expel them (along with all the others of separate ancestry), or assimilate them, inventing a story of common ancestry to cover up the problem. All of these “solutions” have been tried in the last couple of hundred years. None of them would be necessary if we were not trying to match states to nations.

The thinkers who developed nationalism borrowed a set of ideas about what it meant for a people to be a nation that developed in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe. They used these ideas to define their own nations, but also to identify others.

But something new really did enter the way of thinking about peoples toward the end of the eighteenth century in much of Europe. In reaction against the rationalism and restraint of the Enlightenment, Romanticism produced a great upwelling of new feelings and ideas, especially in the expanding middle classes. Among the many marks of the movement were a miscellany of attitudes: a new enthusiasm for the emotions, an appreciation of nature in the face of the encroachments of industry, a passion for the democratic spirit of the French Revolution, and a paradoxical celebration both of folk traditions, like Grimm’s fairy tales, and of modern heroes.

Nationalism grew with Romanticism, then, and so one of its central themes was a new Romantic sense of what made a people a people. The understanding of national character was transformed through a celebration of something spiritual, the soul or spirit of the folk: the Volksgeist, to use the term that captured the idea as it developed in German philosophy.

And the reality of linguistic and cultural variation within a community, Svevo reminds us, can be in tension with the romantic nationalist vision of a community united by language and culture. Indeed, this tension is the rule, rather than the exception.

Given these realities, how have we dealt with the fact that self-determination—which could disrupt any imaginable political order—remains a sacrosanct ideal?

the ideal of national sovereignty remains a profound source of legitimacy, however obscure and unstable our definition of a people. We face here the incoherence I promised to identify at the start of this chapter: Yes, “we” have the right to self-determination, but this idea can guide us only once we’ve decided who “we” are. That question, as I’ve been suggesting, almost never has a single possible answer.

Choosing a language associated with any of the major groups as the language of government (especially if it had been Chinese) would have significantly disadvantaged the other two major groups. So the government made the same decision that had been made in many other parts of the former British and French empires, with the aim of avoiding ethnic conflict: they chose to stick with the colonial language. They also argued that being Anglophone would strengthen the nation’s capacity for effective participation in global trade, the lifeblood of a port city. At

Though English became the official language of government, Malay was the national language, recognizing the status of Malays as the indigenous people of the region. The national anthem is in Malay, as are the parade commands of the Singaporean armed forces. All citizens would learn English in school. If you were Chinese or Indian, you would also learn Mandarin or Tamil, respectively. If you were Malay, you would study Malay. Everyone had to be at least bilingual; but your second language was to be determined by your ethnic origin.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “politics of recognition.” In that model, various identities receive public acknowledgment from the state. Promise and perils: to recognize is to respect, but it is also, to return to one of my themes, to essentialize. When the state gazes at us—with its identity cards, educational stipulations, and other instruments of recognition—it invariably fixes and rigidifies a phenomenon that is neither fixed nor rigid. I have called this the Medusa Syndrome: what the state gazes upon, it tends to turn to stone.25 It sculpts what it purports merely to acknowledge.

As the political theorist Jan-Werner Mueller notes, populists claim to represent 100 percent of the people, by dismissing their opponents as inauthentic betrayers of the people or else as foreigners, not part of the people at all.

Because of this diversity and diffusion, Ghanaians (like Singaporeans) are perfectly aware that they are not a Herderian people, with one history and culture, a single unifying Volksgeist. But that doesn’t stop anyone from thinking of themselves as Ghanaian at elections, or when they are following the Olympics or the World Cup, or when they travel or take up residence abroad.

And so Ghanaians are slowly becoming a people, drawn together over a few decades, as the Scots have been over centuries, by living together under a single government. It’s this process that matters. For my father, then, national consciousness wasn’t a mineral to be excavated, like bauxite; it was a fabric to be woven, like—well, like kente. He would have agreed with Svevo’s observation that “inventing is a creation, not a lie.”28 National identity doesn’t require that we all be already the same. Still, for the purposes of government, citizens need to have languages in common. In developing national education, a state has to decide which dialects of which languages should be taught.

Recognize that nations are invented and you’ll see they’re always being reinvented. Once, to be English, you had to imagine your ancestors were recorded a millennium ago in the Domesday Book. Now a Rohit or a Pavel or a Muhammad or a Kwame can be English.

But, as Renan also argued, what really matters in making a nation, beyond these shared stories, is “the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.” That’s why he said that a nation’s existence “is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite.”30 What makes “us” a people, ultimately, is a commitment to governing a common life together.

However ardently he felt the romance of the national spirit, Burns realized that Scotland was not a fate but a project.

Then, everyone agreed there were what I earlier called “peoples,” groups of human beings defined by shared ancestry, real or imagined, as there had been since the beginnings of recorded history. But the idea that each people shared a common, inherited biological nature was not yet the consensus among European thinkers. For one thing, most of them still believed in the

When Leibniz wrote about what distinguished one people from another, he thought what mattered was language.

The first was that you could explain many of the characteristics of individual human beings as a product of their race. People might be assigned to the Negro race on the basis of their skin color and hair, their thicker lips and broader noses. But these visible differences, though important for classification, were only the beginnings of a catalogue of deeper differences.

but the essential idea—that much that mattered about people was shaped by their race—was broadly accepted. We might call this idea the racial fixation.

A second idea that took hold in the years after Amo came to Europe followed from the racial fixation. If your individual character—not just your body, but your temperament, your habits of life, your artistic work—was deeply formed by your race, then we could see the shared nature of a race in each of its members. Each of us not only belonged to a race, we expressed its nature. The result was that each member of the group was typical: representative, that is, of his or her type. This form of what we might call “typological” thinking

Thomas Jefferson had remarked in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) that he could never “find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.”9 Grégoire sent him a copy of his book On the Literature of Negroes, including its extended discussion of Amo’s life and work, and asked him to think again.

Behind both the racial fixation and the typological thinking was a third habit of mind: we find ourselves face-to-face once more with our natural essentialism, reconstructed now at the heart of scientific theory. Since the late eighteenth century, the conviction has grown and spread that all of us carry within us something derived from the race to which we belong that explains our mental and physical potential. That something, that racial essence, was inherited biologically, transmitted through procreation.

Many historians have concluded that one reason for the increasingly negative view of the Negro through the later eighteenth century was the need to salve the consciences of those who trafficked in and exploited enslaved men and women. As Grégoire put it, bleakly but bluntly, “People have slandered Negroes, first in order to get the right to enslave them, and then to justify themselves for having enslaved them. . . .”14 Many in Europe needed, in short, to believe that the subjugation of black people was justified by their natural inferiority.

Still, ideology—enlisted by forms of domination from slavery to colonization—does help explain why, at a time when scientists were discarding notions like phlogiston, supposedly the substance of fire, they made extraordinary efforts to assert the reality of race. There were the physical anthropologists, with their craniometrical devices; there were the ethnologists and physiologists and the evolutionary theorists, who, discounting Darwin, propagated notions of race degeneration and separate, “polygenic” origins for the various races. One illustrious discipline after another was recruited to give content to color. And so, in the course of the nineteenth century, in a hubbub of contentious argument, the modern race concept took hold.

Once you grasped the Mendelian picture, though, you could see an alternative to the idea of a racial essence. There need be no underlying single something that explained why Negroes were Negroes or Caucasians Caucasian. Their shared appearance could be the product of genes for appearance that they had in common. And those genes need play no role in fixing your tastes in poetry or your philosophical ideas. The prejudices that Arnold and Taine represented no longer had a foundation in the sciences. There was no longer a theory to support the racial fixation.

When chromosomes were discovered, in the early twentieth century, you could understand that genes would mostly be inherited independently of one another;

Another thing became clear through the course of twentieth-century genetics. The vast bulk of our genetic material is shared with all normal human beings, whatever their race.

Ninety percent of the world’s genetic variation is found in every so-called racial group. Take any two human beings, entirely at random: the continental origin of the majority of their ancestors could play only a relatively small role in accounting for their genetic differences.

But that’s because there are patterns of genes in human populations—which is a fact about groups—not because there are distinctive sets of genes shared by the members of a race, which would be a fact about individuals.

There are patterns in populations, but each of us is an individual. To say that these statistical discoveries vindicate the racial theories of the nineteenth century would be like arguing that the statistical correlation between birth month and the length of a career in the National Hockey League confirms the claims of astrology.

What the new understanding of genetics has made clear is that the old picture of race conflated questions of biology and questions of culture. It wanted to explain every difference between groups in terms of an underlying racial essence, inherited by each generation from the one before. Nowadays, it is clear that one of the most distinctive marks of our species is that our inheritance is both biological and cultural. Each generation of human beings in a particular society can build on what was learned by the ones before; by contrast, among our great ape cousins, there is little cultural inheritance, and in most other organisms there is almost none.

The racial assumptions of the nineteenth century were not just scientific; they were also moral. People didn’t only belong to natural racial types; they also had a natural and proper preference for—indeed, they had special obligations to—their own kind. Edward W. Blyden, one of the founders of Pan-Africanism, who was born in the Caribbean but moved to Liberia as a young man, expressed this thought as well as anyone. “Abandoning the sentiment of race,” he wrote in a Sierra Leonean newspaper, in 1893, was like trying to “do away with gravitation.”

Still, this dynamic, in which the idea of race becomes the common currency of negation and affirmation, dominance and resistance, would prove dauntingly difficult to withdraw from. That’s unfortunate.

It is hard to think about race without mentioning racism, a word that was coined—somewhat belatedly, you might think, given this history—not to evoke hostile white attitudes to blacks but to describe the anti-Semitism of the German National Socialists.

Du Bois was taking for granted here not just the standard grumblings of the enemies of German Jewry but also the idea that the German nation was the home to a German race, a race to which Germany’s Jews, however assimilated, could not belong; and in thinking of nations in racial terms, he was

Winston Churchill’s doctor wrote in his diaries, apropos of the prime minister’s attitude to China: “Winston thinks only of the color of their skin; it is when he talks of India or China that you remember he is a Victorian.”

And he went on, in distinct contrast to the tone of his 1893 report: “There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African Slave trade.”24 This was more than five years before the creation of the first Todeslager, as the Nazis called the camps created specifically for the purposes of mass murder.

As for the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the separation of the country’s people into two races, Hutu and Tutsi (with a dash of Twa) was the product of Belgian colonial racial theory. All three were on the same side of the color line: but what Du Bois meant by the problem of the color line didn’t have to be literally about color.

Racial concepts work out in particular ways in particular places. In the United States, the social idea that anyone with one black parent was also black meant that a person could be socially black but have skin that was white, hair that was straight, eyes that were blue.

In the colonial context, race thinking produced anomalies, too. Treating all Africans in Nigeria, say, as Negroes would combine people with very different biological traits.

Discussions of the social significance of race, then, need not be distracted by arguments about whether the groups in question are biological. Members of a socially constructed group can differ statistically in biological characteristics from one another (as rural folk in the United States differ in some health measures from urban people); and whether we should treat someone differently in virtue of the statistical characteristics of a group to which she belongs is always a separate question from whether such group differences exist.

On American campuses where the claim that “race is a social construct” echoes like a mantra, Asian, black, and white identities continue to shape social experience.

When I think about why the racial fixation has proved so durable, I sometimes recall the lost-wax method by which goldweights in Ghana are cast. (You create a wax model, surround it with clay, and melt the wax away by pouring in molten brass.) In this case, the nineteenth-century race concept is the lost wax: the substance may have melted away, but we’ve intently filled the space it created. In the United States, nativists aim to define the country in terms of color and creed (namely, white and Christian). On the other side of the color line, the persistence of material inequality gives a mission to racial identities, for how can we discuss inequities based on color without reference to groups defined by color?

Identities rooted in the reality or the fantasy of shared ancestry remain central in our politics, both within and between nations. In this new century, as in the last, the color line and its cousins are still going strong. Race, you might say, has become a palimpsest, a parchment written upon by successive generations where nothing is ever entirely erased. Often with the most benevolent of intentions, and sometimes with the least, we keep tracing the same contours with different pens.

It’s impossible not to wonder whether his was a flight from color consciousness, a retreat to a place where he would not be defined by his complexion. A place where Amo Afer could be just Amo again; where he didn’t need to be the African. Indeed, his odyssey asks us to imagine what he seems to have yearned for: a world free of racial fixations. It asks if we could ever create a world where color is merely a fact, not a feature and not a fate. It asks if we might not be better off if we managed to give up our racial typologies, abandoning a mistaken way of thinking that took off at just about the moment when Anton Wilhelm Amo was a well-known German philosopher at the height of his intellectual powers.

Under the sway of the meritocratic ideal, many people, these days, are committed to a picture of how the hierarchies of money and status in our world should be organized. They are against (of course!) the old ways of allocating status through birth; and think that jobs should go not to people who have connections but to the best qualified, regardless of class . . . or, for that matter, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or a whole host of other irrelevant identities. Occasionally, they’ll allow for exceptions: for positive discrimination, say, to help undo the effects of previous discrimination. But such exceptions, being motivated by the desire to undo earlier breaches of the rule, are provisional: when the bigotries of sex, race, class, and caste are gone, the exceptions will cease to be warranted.

In my chapters on creed and country, I’ve pointed out that we have a tendency to exaggerate the continuities of such entities over time. When it comes to class, I’m going to argue the opposite—that the continuities here are far greater than we often think. In moving toward the meritocratic ideal, we imagined that we’d moved beyond the old encrustations of inherited hierarchies. As Michael Young knew, that’s not the real story.

At the start of this book, I set out three conceptual features that identities share. The first was a set of labels and the rules for ascribing them to people. The second: the label had meaning for those who bear it, so that it sometimes shaped their behavior and their feelings, in ways they might or might not be aware of. And the third: the label had significance for the way its bearers were treated by others. (That’s why identity has both a subjective and an objective dimension.) In all three domains—labeling, norms, treatment—there can be contest and contention, and this fact will be obvious in the case of class.