The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity — Creed, Country, Colour, Class, Culture

Recommended by Mariela Noles Cotito, 2024-25 Custer Visiting Scholar with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

We tend to believe that at the root of group identity there are strong and profound similitudes that bind the group together. From the outside, then, recognizing a person as part of a specific group would lead us to assign a number of characteristics, preconceptions, and notions on them. That is, pigeonhole them on a specific social identity, whether or not said person ascribes to it. And although it is a most regular and quotidian practice, it has deep and structural consequences of which we might not always be conscious.

Appiah lays out this, very human, process and its consequences, challenging us to recognize our unconscious biases, our refusal to question our social “knowns” and the roots of the attachment to our own tribes.