Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005

BOOK REVIEW

The Value(s) of Identity

by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

• The Ethics of Identity, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Princeton University Press, 2005

The decline that followed the New Left's mythic apogee in 1968 has been blamed on many things. Of all the factors posited, the theory that has attracted perhaps the most attention—and certainly the most debate—has been that the rise of identity politics has splintered universalist liberation movements.

Proponents of this argument say that ever-multiplying advocacy groups, forwarding the interests of competing identities, have led us to forget the broad categories that might unite us all—especially class—and have led to leftists wasting tremendous amounts of energy on symbolic battles such as campus culture wars. Others have countered that such movements—from gay liberation to black power to Asian-American pride—have not only been important in empowering oppressed groups, but have also injected crucial energy into progressive politics as a whole.

Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity is not an intervention into this debate. It is rather an examination of the moral, social, and political implications of the ways we both form and articulate identities. It approaches the politics of identity only as incidental to a larger conceptual interrogation of "identity." But as such, The Ethics of Identity has more to say about the debate over identity politics than many works that take identity as a given.

Appiah's scholarly project is to excavate the foundational texts of modern liberalism to see what they have to say about identity's relationship to liberty. "Do identities represent a curb on autonomy, or do they provide its contours?" Appiah asks. That is, does the process of figuring out who we are stand to make us freer or simply constrain us in the straitjacket of a predetermined label?

According to Appiah, this question is not new. What is new, however, is how we now think about identity in relation to "culture"—not high culture, but systems of meaning and allegiance that all people possess. Appiah, due to his own peripatetic life—he was raised in Ghana, educated in England, and has long been a professor in the United States—knows firsthand the profound inadequacy of asking people to attach all their loyalty to a single culture among many to which they might feel allegiance. Yet he is no friend of multiculturalism: the celebration of a culture—just like its degradation—always has a tendency to bind and make static that which is moving, complex, and varied. Thus, for Appiah, any cultural rights protected by the state must always be afforded individuals rather than groups.

The conceptual logic underlying this argument is hard to dispute. Multiculturalism, however, is as much a political program as a concept, and it deserves credit for its merits and effects as such. In this regard, it is clear that multiculturalism has come to function as an essential counterweight to xenophobia and racism in many societies. The complex challenge that thus falls to multiculturalism's defenders is to figure out how to do justice to the fact that what we call "cultures" are themselves profoundly multicultural—and moreover, to recognize that we ourselves, as individuals, carry many cultures within us.

The intellectual tradition within which Appiah situates himself is the "sway-backed steed" of classical liberalism. Though perfectly worthy, this outlook does have its limits. Particularly glaring is the author's non-engagement with Cultural Studies, which has so relentlessly dissected the relationship between identity and the politics of liberation. As that tradition's chief exponent, Stuart Hall, reminds us, "one only discovers who one is because of the identities one has to take on in order to act." Developing a positive regard for oneself has always necessitated the formulation of an identity. The identities we take on may never adequately comprise the complexity of all that we are and believe. Yet it is only in understanding ourselves as this type of woman or that type of man, possessed of this nationality or these values, that we find the necessary foundation from which to speak and act in the world.

Given this truth, the conclusion Appiah eloquently affirms is spot on: the key to living a moral life is clearly not to seek to forego identity. On the contrary, it is to put identity in the service of becoming ethical human beings. The challenge, always, must be to understand and use identity as a means to achieving our humanity—and never, ever, as a substitute for it.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a writer based in San Francisco and currently a graduate student in geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

Source Citation

Jelly-Schapiro, Joshua. 2005. The value(s) of identity. Tikkun 20(6):74.