Are You a Race Abolitionist?

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Most of the genetic variance in the human population is within the continent of africa or asia, or europe or north america. So that these forms of racial differentiation don't correlate very much with lots of the things that matter about people. It might be better if we didn't store information about people under the label black, white, yellow, brown.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-Ghanaian philosopher, the Ethicist columnist for the New York Times Magazine, and one of today's deepest thinkers about the nature of identity. His scholarly writing, journalism, and novels help us to envision a world in which our professed categories enrich rather than impoverish—or, in his terms, a world which reveres “universality plus difference.”

In this week’s conversation, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Yascha Mounk discuss neutrality as a liberal ideal, the limits of identity politics, and the merits of race-abolitionism.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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