What Is Identity?

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The concept of identity is at the core of so much culture and politics. But what does it even mean? What do identities have in common with anything? All involve labelling kinds of people, he says. The process of naming plays a role in their genesis. And then there's this sort of extra thought - that they've to be so central to our thinking about ethics and politics.

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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