First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Identity and Ideology

Racism has been the intractable stumbling block of the liberal project during my lifetime.

I grew up as a Unitarian Universalist child during the euphoric heyday of the civil rights movement in the 60s; up until the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, when I was 13, it seemed to me, and I think to my parents and our suburban Washington DC congregation, that this was a struggle we were in the process of winning. National legal victories in congress, together with the regional work of demonstrations and marches, Freedom riders and voter registrations, public school and university integration, gave tangible evidence that blatant injustice could be identified and corrected. With legal barriers struck down, and cultural prejudices exposed to enlightened disdain and ridicule, I was persuaded in my youth that this issue would soon be behind us. Negroes, as my parents taught me was the respectful term, would take their rightful places in a fully integrated society, to achieve and thrive just like the rest of us.

I still believe in that unselfconscious promise of equality, but in the nearly four decades that have passed since those fraught and fateful days, I have come to understand that it’s not as simple as we thought. Partly, it’s just harder, longer work than we realized; the barriers are subtler and more ingrained; prejudice like a sophisticated virus mutates, and survives to infect new populations and generations faster than we can design inoculations. A history of injustice doesn’t obligingly vanish, even if its overt practices really were to cease. White privilege operates, invisible to those who possess it, insidiously obvious to those who do not enjoy its benefits. All of these systemic vestiges of historical racism challenge our good intentions, and confront us with the necessity to re-examine our lives, our assumptions, and our social structures.

But there is yet another factor that complicates this equation in a way no one suggested that I reckon with, back in the days when we were, black and white together, confident that we were destined, eventually, to overcome. The premise of America’s mid-century civil rights movement, as I understood it, was that it was unfair for African Americans to be prevented from acting just like white people. It never occurred to my community, at least that I ever heard about at the time, to ask whether the opportunity that minorities wanted was necessarily the right to become entirely like us.

Perhaps the most fundamental reconsideration of the meaning of racism, that has with great difficulty penetrated the consciousness of liberal white society during the past forty years, has been the notion of multi-culturalism; the idea that, delightful people though we are in ourselves, it may not necessarily be the case that everybody else’s fondest hope is to replicate our values and tastes and ways of being in the world. Not only is this reservation a blow to our collective ego – a difficulty not to be discounted in itself – but it also throws a philosophical monkey wrench into the whole unsophisticated understanding of the Enlightenment humanist enterprise. For the very concepts of human dignity and equality to which we appeal in proclaiming the immorality of prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory practices, are rooted in a particular intellectual tradition, the universal validity of which is suddenly called into question.

We struggled with this paradoxical insight through the end of the century; we struggle with it still, as the new millennia unfolds. How is it possible for the heirs of a politically, economically, and technologically dominant culture, to disperse the benefits of that worldview – including its notion of equal human rights – in some just way, without in the same act imposing our particular, exclusive visions of the good upon people who had their own ideas before we came along? It is this dilemma with which Kwame Appiah invites us to engage, as he proposes the concept of the "cosmopolitan" – literally, the citizen of the world; cosmos-politan – as a stance that might enable us to find a way between the intellectual rocks. On the one side stands a helplessly multi-cultural relativism, impotent to establish a basis for judging any collective reality, including racism itself, or for instance terrorism, or any oppressive but popular opinion about the role of women, alien nationals, sexual minorities, religious dissidents, or any of the other usual suspects. On the other side lies the solipsistic trap of cultural imperialism; the assumption that since we find our own opinions to be rational and informed, anyone who cares to question their dicta is demonstrably superstitious and ignorant. Appiah begins with this caution:

Appiah contends that we must accept the idea that any definition of our ‘humanity’ is partly a cultural artifact; based on a constellation of relationships and values that exist in a social context. Who we are is not just genetics and physiology; it has to do with how we make meaning, and that is an ethical process that is specific to our understanding of our cultural roles. He writes:

Sophia Fahs was correct when she observed that ‘It matters what we believe," both in terms of what ideas and projects we give our loyalty to, and even in terms of how we think the world is constituted. Appiah illustrates it this way:

It is not the process of reason, or a specific scientific understanding of the world, that we are most likely to hold in common across cultures, Appiah claims. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we cannot trust our human similarities on a different level. What we are most likely to have in common, he suggests, is the capacity for narrative and imagination; we may not always be able to enter into one another’s principles or beliefs, but we can almost always share stories.

The thing about stories is that they are invitational, persuasive. You do not have to ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’ them in order to envision the world they offer to our shared imagination. We can each respond to them out of our own individual understandings and contexts, but the narrative or image itself remains a shared experience, a point of common reference. To be a citizen of the cosmos, Appiah contends, is to engage one’s own and others’ stories, to be part of a network woven of the human capacity for narrative imagination.

If we have learned nothing else in the past forty years of struggle with the issues of racial equality and fundamental human rights, we have surely come to understand the central importance of hearing people’s stories. Indeed, that act in itself is sometimes one of the most healing things we can do; to enter genuinely with the full power of our imagination into another person’s narrative, even when it is painful; even, and especially, when such a story does not serve to flatter our own cleverness or decency, when it does not make us feel good about ourselves. Such stories, whether they are personal or collective – movies, and songs, for instance, are collective narratives – can do transforming work in us without evoking the resistance of argument, without in any way denying us the authenticity of our own unique response to their conjured worlds.

Kwame Appiah goes on to argue that one of the recognitions that emerges more readily from such engaged narratives than it does from formal philosophical discourse, is some rough agreement about what many different nations and cultures have begun to think of as universal human rights. He sees an agreement in practice about the general content of such rights as much more likely and immediate than a consensus about their philosophical foundations. He writes:

He concludes:

America’s long struggle with the legacy of slavery and the evil of racism constitutes our society’s own unique ordeal in the implementation of the Enlightenment’s liberal, humanist values. Kwame Appiah, the child of two worlds, and scholar of thought in our intellectual idiom by choice, shows us that we can, if we are careful and creatively attentive, still pursue that agenda for justice without letting it become yet another gesture of oppression. Without abandoning the defining, particular loyalties and communities that constitute our personal identities and define our values, we may still be citizens of the world, committed to the common rights of human dignity and freedom. In the songs we sing, in the stories we tell, our humanity becomes transparent, and connects with the humanity of diverse others. And in that connection may be just the wisdom and the power that we need to save the world we share.

When my father died, my sisters and I found a hand-written draft of the final message he had meant to leave us. It began by reminding us of the history of our two families; his in Ghana, and our mother’s in England, which he took to be a summary account of who we were. But then he wrote, "Remember that you are citizens of the world." He told us that wherever we chose to live – and, as citizens of the world, we could surely choose to live anywhere that would have us – we should endeavor to leave that place "better than you found it." "Deep inside of me," he went on, "is a great love for mankind and an abiding desire to see mankind, under God, fulfill its highest destiny."

That notion of leaving a place "better than you found it" was a large part of what my father understood by citizenship. It wasn’t just a matter of belonging to a community; it was a matter of taking responsibility with that community for its destiny. As evidenced by his long-term practical commitment to the United Nations and a host of other international organizations, he felt this responsible solidarity with all humanity. But he was also intensely engaged with many narrower, overlapping communities. He titled the account he wrote of his life, The Autobiography of an African Patriot; and what he meant by this epithet was not just that he was an African and a patriot of Ghana, but that he was a patriot of Africa as well. He felt about the continent and its people what he felt about Ghana and Ghanaians; that the were fellows, that they had a shared destiny. And he felt the same thing, in a more intimate way, about Ashanti, the region of Ghana where he and I were raised, the residuum of the great Asante empire that had dominated our region before its conquest by the British.

Growing up with this father and an English mother, who was both deeply connected to our family in England and fully rooted in Ghana, where she has now lived for half a century, I never found it hard to live with many such loyalties. Our community was Asante, was Ghana, was Africa, but it was also (in no particular order) England, the Methodist Church, the Third World; and in his final words of love and guidance to his children, my father insisted that it was also all of humanity.

Is there sense in the sentiment? Is being a citizen of the world – a "cosmopolitan" in the word’s root sense – something one can, or should, aspire to? If we ‘dip into the future,’ do we really anticipate ‘the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world’? People have offered reasons for skepticism, and from a range of perspectives. Some deny that the notion, however endearing Tennyson’s "Locksley Hall" rhetoric, can be reconciled with the constitutive role of our local and positional attachments. "Cosmopolitanism," in their view, gives to aery nothing a local habitation and a name; but aery nothing it remains. Others view it not as unattainable but as objectionable; for them it is a distinctively modern mode of deracination – something essentially parasitic upon the tribalism it disdains, the posturing of privilege. Cosmopolitan values, it has been said, are really imperial ones – a parochialism, yet again, puffed up with Universalist pretensions; liberalism on safari. And, as we’ll see, even for sympathetic souls, cosmopolitanism poses a congeries of paradoxes.