The Ethics of Identity

"Appiah is a gay man of Anglo-Ghanian heritage living in the United States. He well understands the pressures of differences from those around him. He recognises that he has to reconcile those differences, and that we, as a community, have to recognise differences. I think he’s right: we don’t all have to be the same, but we need to respect each other’s differences. At the same time, we need a common language so that we can explore who the enemies of the open society are, because if we don’t identify them, we are really going to struggle. These enemies are all about us and are constantly trying to undermine us and attack our differences. We have to find common ground, and a common language. Appiah offers an imaginative moral solution to that. I applaud him for having done so, and his work has helped shape the way I think. “I’m more than the sum of my parts. That is what I told Enoch Powell when I met him in 1992.” Appiah appeals to my sense of fairness, and appeals to my sense that difference does matter. I’m very conscious of the differences that have shaped me, but I’m more than the sum of my parts. That’s where the cosmopolitanism lies. That – by the way – is what I told Enoch Powell when I met him in 1992. I said, ‘Enoch, you were wrong. You said, in 1968, when those bovver boys in laced up boots were spitting in my face, that we had no place here. You were wrong. We have shaped a place for ourselves in Britain. If only you would embrace us, we would embrace you, and we can find a common place where we don’t need to shed blood in the River Tiber.’ He was very quiet and thoughtful. We have to accept, first, that race doesn’t exist in any meaningful scientific sense. Most people have accepted that. What we’re still left with is cultural racism, that is, that people do still behave differently to other people because of the colour of their skin. In addition to that, black people themselves have become enslaved in the mythologies passed down from history. They need to unchain themselves from that slavery of language. If I have a student of colour come into my university office, I’m not interested in his or her skin colour. I’m more interested in the quality of their mind, and their ability to apply themselves to a particular problem. If we can create a new cadre of people who get beyond the idea of race defining them, we can get beyond the mentality reproduced by cultural racism. It is a function of imagination. We have to learn to re-imagine ourselves. We have to get to a position where people are not defined by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character and the contribution to the world they want to make."