Racial identity is a biological nonsense, says Reith lecturerPosted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Philosophy, Social Science on 2016-10-19 00:05Z by Steven |
Racial identity is a biological nonsense, says Reith lecturer
The Guardian
2016-10-18
Hannah Ellis-Petersen, Culture Reporter
 Kwame Anthony Appiah says ‘race does nothing for us’. Photograph: BBC |
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah says race and nationality are social inventions being used to cause deadly divisions
Two weeks ago Theresa May made a statement that, for many, trampled on 200 years of enlightenment and cosmopolitan thinking: “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”.
It was a proclamation blasted by figures from all sides, but for Kwame Anthony Appiah, the philosopher who on Tuesday gave the first of this year’s prestigious BBC Reith lectures, the sentiment stung. His life – he is the son a British aristocratic mother and Ghanian anti-colonial activist father, raised as a strict Christian in Kumasi, then sent to British boarding school, followed by a move to the US in the 1970s; he is gay, married to a Jewish man and explores identity for a living – meant May’s comments were both “insulting and nonsense in every conceivable way”…
Read the entire article here.