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The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

Kwame Anthony Appiah · 2018 · Medium (150–350 pages)

4.3 from 3 reviews · 41 views

Gender, race & identityAnalytic
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What it is

Developed from Appiah's 2016 BBC Reith Lectures, the book examines the social identities that shape modern lives: creed, country, colour, class and culture, with an opening chapter on how identities classify people at all. In each case Appiah argues that we commonly misunderstand the identity as resting on some shared inner essence, whether a fixed set of religious doctrines, a primordial nation, a biological race, a natural class order or a unified 'Western civilisation'. He uses history, his own family's Ghanaian and English background, and examples from many places to show that identities are made, changed and contested over time. Appiah does not argue that identities should be abandoned, since they give people community and meaning, but that recognising how they are constructed lets us hold them more freely and reshape them.

Why read it

It is a humane, readable account of what identities are and why we so often misdescribe them.

Where to start

Read the opening chapter on classification, then whichever identity matters most to you.

Talking about Kwame Anthony Appiah

Reviews

  1. Harpreet Kaur Grewal

    The chapter on creed explained something I have struggled to say at the gurdwara: religion is a practice and a community as much as a set of beliefs. Seva is not a doctrine you hold but something you do with others. Accessible and kind in tone, and short enough to lend.

  2. Keisha Monroe

    Appiah writes beautifully and the chapter on colour is a clear statement of why biological race is a fiction. My reservation is that showing an identity is constructed does not make it lighter for those it is imposed on, and Du Bois knew that. Appiah knows it too, but the book's cosmopolitan calm can feel far from my students' lives.

  3. Khady Faye

    I teach philosophy in Dakar, and the chapter on culture, attacking the idea of a single 'Western civilisation', makes a perfect pair with Senghor. My students enjoyed seeing a philosopher raised in Ghana take on both Western and African essentialisms, and the lycée debate that followed lasted well past the bell.