The trouble with identity

From the Boston Sunday Globe today comes this interview by Drake Bennett with Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of a recent book from the Princeton Press: The Ethics of Identity.

As a teaser:

"IDEAS: You're well-known for writing that there's no such thing as race. What do you mean by that?

APPIAH: I'm no longer inclined to stress that way of formulating the claim, because it produces so much resistance, and I don't really care about that formulation. What I care about is getting people to see that race as a form of social identity is not the product of biologically significant ways of dividing human beings into groups.

I don't want to deny that it matters to many African Americans that they're African-American. Nor do I think it's any of my business whether it should matter to them or not. That's exactly the sort of thing that I take to be up to them.

IDEAS: There are, though, physiological differences between people whose ancestors came from different parts of the world. Doesn't that suggest some biological difference?

APPIAH: There's much more variation even within those continental populations than most people realize. If you take a characteristic like skin color, there are many biologically distinct ways of getting to look dark-skinned. Modern aborigines in Australia aren't especially closely related to modern Africans but they happen to both be, many of them, dark-skinned."

The book idea seems to be exploring the problems with the categorization/classifications we make. While it helps to simplify a discussion, the classifications can take on a life of their own. A recent example of this was the controversy around the red vs. blue states. You recall that mathematically a state was coded red or blue by whatever majority happened to take the day. A more interesting portrayal might be something akin to the Map of the Market. Here, the math behind what the market is doing graphically presents the gradations along a continuum rather than the either or depiction of red or blue. If I could do the math, I think the color of the USA map would be more purple (and shades thereof) than red/blue.

I believe I'll add this book to my reading list. I'd like to see how close I have come in this expectation.

If you have already read this book, please let me know what you think.