Rethinking Black and White

African-American studies does not come "naturally" to Kwame Anthony Appiah, who came to Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department last year.

"I had to learn African-American studies," he says. "You don't intuitively know the way American culture sees race."

A scholar who deflates conventional notions of racial, ethnic and cultural categorizations, Appiah's' life story appropriately puts just those notions into question. Born in London, he spent his childhood in the West African nation of Ghana. His mother is English, his father a Ghanian lawyer who was influential in his country's independence movement. Otumfuo Nana Opoku Ware II, the King of the Asante tribe, is his uncle, and his maternal grandparents are a titled couple from Gloucestershire.

"I must have thought about [race] somewhat--my mother's English, my father Ghanian. Somebody must have mentioned it," he says. "But I don't remember thinking about it a great deal before I came to this country. And I remember being brought up to think that what people said about it was generally such rubbish."

Appiah speaks softly in a British accent, and is immensely understated about his background and his achievements. Most of the time he talks at a languid, thoughtful pace, but occasionally the words rush out in the sort of complex sentences most people can only compose with pen and paper in hand. Talking about his years as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, he shows a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor.

"It was very boring," he says of his brief time as a pre-med. "I decided pretty quickly that it was only worth doing something that boring if you wanted to be a doctor. I've still got a smattering of medical knowledge lodged somewhere at the bottom of my cerebellum."

Appiah switched his major to philosophy, and later earned a doctorate in linguistics. It was at Cambridge that he met and befriended Henry Louis Gates Jr., then a fellow at the English college. the two would later teach together at Yale, Cornell, Duke and now Harvard. Gates encouraged Appiah to study African-American history and culture. At Yale, Appiah did joint work in African-American and African studies.

When he arrived in America, Appiah was intrigued by the racial questions that been so important in defining the character of society here. As a philosopher, African-American studies attracted him because of the ethical dilemmas of a nation dealing with its own racism. He was also excited about studying neglected African-American thinkers and artists, exploring how they have responded to that history of prejudice.

And he was struck by the contemporary reality of African-American culture.

"I was interested in the positive things, such as the character of the reception I felt I got from African-Americans," he says. "There was a kind of assumption, false or not it didn't matter, that I was a part of something. The experiences of race are not entirely negative; race is also a basis for solidarity."

Still, Appiah feels "race" is a category we can do without, He rarely uses the word without quotation marks around it, and calls it a biologically meaningless, even dangerous method of classifying people. The notion that people of the African diaspora are united by a common "racial" heritage is a fiction invented by the Western mind, he says.

"The intellectual attraction of race was that it was this one thing that bound all people of African descent together, and in the name of it you could...handle nation building, literature, philosophy, everything. It doesn't work."

In his new book, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Appiah also rejects the idea that "Africa" is a cohesive entity, a place whose ethos can be distilled or whose people can be grouped.

"Whatever Africans share, we do not have a common traditional culture, common languages, a common religious or conceptual vocabulary," he writes.

And he says Americans of all colors understand too little about this complex continent.

"You go to the library, pick up Time magazine, and see how often Africa gets on the cover. It's there quite a lot. But there's never a picture of a person. It's always an animal, always a giraffe or an elephant. [The articles] are always about things of interest to people with cameras and guns, about tourism," he says. "This is a continent which at the moment has huge quantities of refugees all over place, wars and rumors of wars, as well as wonderfully positive things, none of which ever surface. So I think people both need more information and need to stop thinking about Africa as a place that should interest Black Americans. the problems of Africa are human problems."

A similary broad sensibility informs his view of African-American history. "The pride I feel in African-American achievements is the pride in human achievement," he says.

Appiah has been for the duration of his scholarly life a staunch opponent of Afrocentric ideology ("The history they teach is rubbish," he says). He rejects the racialized version of history offered by many contemporary Afrocentric writers.

Instead, Appiah is interested in African Americans not because they come from a common "race," but because they have played a pivotal role in the history and ideology of America.

"The problem [with Afrocentrism] is that it neglects entirely a very important source of pride for African-Americans, which is African-American history, which despite all the negative aspects has seen astonishing achievements...it worries me that people feel they have to go somewhere else."

His stance runs counter to the viewpoints of many of his outspoken students, he says. "People sometimes say we [in Afro-American Studies] aren't Afrocentric enough," he says.

Students, he says, ask him to discuss the Pan-African thinkers who believed an international racial alliance was the only way to solve the problems of American blacks and Africans.

"I have been teaching it for ten years, I write about it I think they were fascinating guys," he says. "I don't agree with them, but then I don't agree with anyone in the nineteenth century about anything."

In general, though, he says the differences between his views and those of his students have not been counterproductive. There is always a "gap in understanding" between students and professors, he says. "If there's [not], then you should get better professors."

Appiah believes his views on race are painfully obvious. "I take most of what I say to be part of intelligent common sense," he says. "When people like Skip urged me, having talked to me, to write down those things that I thought, I thought it would be a waste of time."

Very few people concur in this modest account of his work.

Nicholas L. Sturgeon, chair of the philosophy department at Cornell, calls his former colleague "terrific, a real catch academically. He's published a lot on standard philosophical issues, and he's extremely learned on African thought. He manages to bring these two together quite fruitfully."

"He was a superb colleague," says Robert N. Brandon, chair of Duke's philosophy department. "I think he's quite unusual in having a range of interests from mainstream topics in analytic philosophy to contemporary culture to African thought. there are very few people who have that breadth."

And in a recent review for The New York Times, novelist Charles Johnson called In My Father's House" one of the handful of theoretical works on race that will help us preserve our humanity and guide us gracefully into the next century."

Despite his sedate appearance, Appiah is astoundingly busy with a variety of projects that give new meaning to the term "interdisciplinary scholar."

Besides regularly contributing to philosophical and cultural publications, he coedits, with Gates, Transition, a journal "which looks at the world from within the African diaspora." This summer, he completed a manuscript of a book of proverbs from Asanti, the kingdom in which he grew up. And he is currently editing The Oxford Book of African Literature.

In what he calls "a big project which will probably take a decade," Appiah plans to "think through the way in which idealization works in structuring other kinds of theory." He's also preparing several essays on contemporary Afrocentrists.

In the meantime, he devours mystery novels.

"I do so much reading that's serious and meant to produce 'readings,' that I read these for entertainment," he says. Last year he tried his own hand at the genre, publishing Avenging Angel, a tale of murder set at Cambridge University.

He says he has a few more mysteries in his head, and that in his next he wants to explore "people with titles who have no money," aristocrats who inhabit run-down, once-glamorous mansions. "I happen to know, for boring reasons, people who live in places like that. I think that sort of shabby gentility is interesting."

More immediately, Appiah will be handling much of the restructuring of the Afro-American Studies Department. Next year, he will teach Afro-Am 10, a new course which will introduce the major works and issues of the field. In addition, the department will offer two smaller required courses, 11 and 12, with annually changing topics.

"You can theoretically do 10, 11 and 12 in one year," he says. "We wanted a system that was more flexible."

Appiah says the new courses, which will replace the sophomore and junior tutorials, are an attempt to accommodate concentrators who decided to enter the department late. The increasing numbers in the recently rejuvenated department seem to confirm his vision of Afro-American studies as a subject which appeals across disciplinary and cultural lines.

"I believe it's very important for us to contribute to the general education of the college," he says. "Americans ought to know about African-American studies."