Inter-American Imagination and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind

Inspired by thought-provoking discussions with many students over the past year of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (Liveright, 2018), I propose a book discussion to encourage further study and critique by American philosophers of this latest installment of Appiah’s “rooted cosmopolitanism.” In alliterative chapters on creed, country, color, class, and culture (with periodic references to gender and sexuality), Appiah probes the error of attributing people’s behaviors and concerns to an unchanging identity deep inside them that makes them similar to all others who are labeled/categorized in the same way. For example, extending his widely discussed and controverted criticisms of racial essentialism, Appiah concludes chapter four (“Color”) by asking us to imagine a world in which our skin complexion and hair texture are merely facts about us, “not a fate.” Such a de-racialized imagination would, he says, require us to move beyond at least three bad intellectual habits: (a) the racial fixation, (b) typological thinking, and (c) essentialism. The latter is Appiah’s chief target throughout this book. In Appiah’s graphic restatement of Dewey’s fallacy of hypostatization, essentialism in identity thinking elicits a Medusa-like reductive gaze that turns people’s transactive, creative experiments in living into stone. One subtle upshot is that even a policy that is intended to recognize and respect differences often, Appiah says in a case study of Singapore, “sculpts what it purports merely to acknowledge.”

Not a pragmatist in his epistemology, Appiah nevertheless joins Dewey’s effort to advance philosophy’s project of “intellectual disrobing,” enabling us to critically inspect intellectual habits to see “what they are made of and what wearing them does to us” (LW 1:40). Among the many reflective opportunities of convening SAAP’s 2020 conference at San Miguel de Allende will be a chance to discuss why the very idea of Inter-American philosophy seems unintelligible to many north of the border who identify themselves as Americans. Appiah’s examination of creed, country, color, class, and culture offer a framework for discussing, for example, ultra-nationalist Breitbart News’s story from July 2019: “The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy has announced that it is moving its annual conference to Mexico.” Of course, in sharp opposition to Breitbart News’s stoking the resurgence of white nationalism, anger, and fear amid economic dislocation in the United States, the American philosophical tradition that includes contemporary theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins emphasizes that we understand problems better when we democratically inhabit the standpoint of intersecting identities while distancing ourselves from those who assume that only their own values and concerns have overriding force when diagnosing and ameliorating problems. In that American spirit, Appiah’s work raises pressing questions for contemporary philosophers regarding the shape our Inter-American imaginations should take.