TEXTE 32 Racial identity is a biological nonsense The Guardian, October 2016. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah says race and nationality are social inventions being used to cause deadly divisions Two weeks ago  Theresa May made a statement  that, for many, trampled on 200 years of enlightenment and cosmopolitan thinking: “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”. It was a proclamation blasted by figures from all sides, but for Kwame Anthony Appiah, the philosopher, the sentiment stung. His life – he is the son a British aristocratic mother and Ghanian anti-colonial activist father, raised as a strict Christian in Kumasi, then sent to British boarding school, followed by a move to the US in the 1970s; he is gay, married to a Jewish man and explores identity for a living – meant May’s comments were both “insulting and nonsense in every conceivable way”. “It’s just an error of history to say, if you’re a nationalist, you can’t be a citizen of the world,” says Appiah bluntly. Yet, the prime minister’s words were timely. They were an example of what Appiah considers to be grave misunderstandings around identity; in particular how we see race, nationality and religion as being central to who we are. Regarded as one of the  world’s greatest thinkers  on African and African American cultural studies, Appiah has taught at Yale, Harvard, Princeton and now NYU. Appiah’s lecture on nationality draws heavily on the “nonsense misconceptions” he saw emerge prominently in the Brexit and Donald Trump campaigns – that to preserve our national identity we have to oppose globalisation. “Whether it’s these current stories of essential Britishness, stories of times of essential Hinduness in India, or tales of a pure Islamic state, they are all profoundly unfaithful to historic fact,” he says. “Nationality, religion, both have always been fluid and evolving, that’s how they have survived.” And when it comes to self identify, Appiah argues, race is just as misunderstood as nationality – with disastrous consequences.  Society still largely operates under the misapprehension that race (largely defined by skin colour) has some basis in biology. There is a perpetuating idea that black-skinned or white-skinned people across the world share a similar set of genes that set the two races apart, even across continents. In short, it’s what Appiah calls “total twaddle”. “The way that we talk about race today is just incoherent,” he says. “The thing about race is that it is a form of identity that is meant to apply across the world, everybody is supposed to have one – you’re black or you’re white or you’re Asian – and it’s supposed to be significant for you, whoever and wherever you are. But biologically that’s nonsense.” It’s not new information, but for Appiah it is essential to voice it. Despite growing up mixed-race and gay in Ghana, then moving to the UK aged 11, Appiah says these supposedly conflicting aspects of his identity were never a problem for him until he moved to the US. As a student at Yale in his early 20s, others began to define him entirely by his race, and even questioned whether having a white mother made him “really black”. “If you try to say what the whiteness of a white person or the blackness of a black person actually means in scientific terms, there’s almost nothing you can say that is true or even remotely plausible. Yet socially, we use these things all the time as if there’s a solidity to them.” Appiah is at pains to point out that, while society has made race and colour a significant part of how we identify ourselves, particularly in places such as the UK and US, it is an invented idea to which we cling irrationally.  Appiah’s lecture explores the notion that two black-skinned people may share similar genes for skin colour, but a white-skinned person and a black-skinned person may share a similar gene that makes them brilliant at playing the piano. So why, he asks, have we decided that one is the core of our identity and the other is a lesser trait? At a time when the world continues to divide itself along racial lines and where, in the US, “being put in that black box means you tend to get treated worse and are more likely to get shot by a police officer”, getting people to understand race as a social invention could, in Appiah’s view, save lives. He is adamant that identity is not “just a philosopher’s fuss” and that the world bears the scars of endless crusades fought to protect it. “Mistakes about race were at the heart of the Rwandan genocide; the invasion of Iraq in 2001 was shaped by American nationalism and chauvinism about Muslims; nationality is clearly stopping us doing our part in dealing with things such as the refugee crisis, because we feel like it will threaten our own identity,” says Appiah. “This crisis that we are facing now is rooted in these moral and intellectual confusions about identity. And it is very costly to keep making these mistakes.” (817 words)