Focus on dignity forges bonds

This rejection of essentialism, of some force ostensibly tethering a people, is the thrust of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind, a memorable tour through the history and philosophy of identity based on religion, nation, race, class and culture.

Appiah, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, understands the integrating power of identity – “we’re clannish creatures,” he writes – but also recognizes its bent toward destructive social hierarchies.

Identities can become “the enemies of human solidarity, the sources of war, horsemen of a score of apocalypses from apartheid to genocide,” he writes. “Yet these errors are also central to the way identities unite us today.”

Appiah, too, dwells on the individualism behind our various collectives.

“People may join churches and temples and mosques and announce sectarian identities, but when it comes to the fine points of belief, it can sometimes seem that each of us is a sect of one.”

And he regards that identity as inherently volatile, shifting over time.

Cultural identity, for instance, is not an immutable inheritance; it is acquired, spread, transmitted, mixed, messy.

“That it has no essence,” Appiah writes, “is what makes us free.” This is the identity not of the group but of the individual cutting across countless groups, whose salience varies in different moments and circumstances.

Scholars of intersectionality emphasize how a mix of identities can leave individuals vulnerable to multiple forms of systemic oppression and discrimination, while other writers go so far as to dismiss individuality itself as a fiction.

In her book White Fragility, a catalog of how white Americans’ racial deflections –

– only affirm white advantages and “invalidate” nonwhite experiences, lecturer Robin DiAngelo spurns individualism as another Western ideology, a “storyline” that erases the significance of identity groups.

DiAngelo even includes an author’s note anticipating how white, nonwhite and multiracial audiences may receive her arguments. (I must say, being told in advance how I will react to a book invalidates my experience as a book critic.)

By contrast, individual identity as a means to broad-based rights is the kind of identity politics that Fukuyama finds most constructive, yet the one he worries is most threatened.

“Universal recognition has been challenged ... by other partial forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, ethnicity, or gender, or by individuals wanting to be recognized as superior,” he writes. “Unless we can work our way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.”

But there is no working our way back, only a lengthy path forward.

Identity politics, by underscoring the inconsistencies of our grand national visions, shows how far there is left to travel.

“I am grateful for my ancestors’ struggle and their survival,” Austin Channing Brown responds archly when people emphasize that things have gotten better. “But I am not impressed with America’s progress.”

In the end, though, there needn’t be some trade-off between our individual and collective identities, as DiAngelo suggests and Fukuyama fears.

“Each person’s sense of self is bound to be shaped by his or her own background,” Appiah writes, “beginning with family but spreading out in many directions – to nationality, which binds us to places; to gender, which connects us with roughly half the species; and to such categories as class, sexuality, race, and religion, which all transcend our local affiliations.”

It may be that identity politics comes down to the individual, but that the individual quest for dignity is easier within a group.

Less exhausting.

For my birthday recently, I received an Ancestry. com kit.

I was born in Lima to Peruvian parents but with some Spaniard roots, and I’ve often wondered, half in jest, whether I was more Inca or conqueror. A few weeks after I spit into a tube, the verdict came: 52 per cent Spain, just 28 per cent Andes.

Such tests are hardly definitive, but the result was still a shock. What did I know of Spanish history and culture, beyond some school-age texts? Was I less connected to my Peruvian origins, less part of the north-south dynamic dominating the Hispanic-American experience? God forbid, must I begin cheering for Spain’s la Roja along with Peru’s blanquirroja?

Then I calmed down. DNA does not equal identity. Better to treat this new insight as yet one more layer, one more ambiguity in a whole that is always rediscovering its parts.

No one has yet asked for my pronouns, but I’ve realized there’s only one that fits: It’s me.