Anthony Appiah: Conversation with Genius

Before my podcast episode featuring philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah was released last Thursday, I had last conversed with him thirty years ago. In the spring of 1994, I attended Princeton University's “Race Matters” conference. The highlight was a keynote address by Toni Morrison, a year after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

However, a short chat with Appiah while strolling on the pristine Ivy League campus made as strong a mark on my memory. He had just finished moderating a panel discussion. When he began it, Appiah made clear to all the panelists their presentation time. Yet one panelist, a black American female academic, spoke for what sounded to me much longer than the allotted time.

I found it curious that Appiah let this pass without a remark as moderator.

So, as we walked, I recalled his admonition to the panelists regarding time limits for speaking and asked why he hadn’t said anything to the violator.

Without missing a beat, he turned to me and asked: “When’s the last time you interrupted a black woman while she was speaking?”

Point well-made. He dropped the mic on me.

Some months later, I invited Appiah to a radio special that I produced titled “The Afrocentricity Debate.” Afrocentricity was the rage in certain corners of Afro-American life and thought. I’d studied this variant of black nationalism since college in the early- to mid-80s. Mainstream media seemed fascinated by the theory, exploring whether, for example, Western civilization had an African origin after Martin Bernal won the 1990 American Book Award for his book Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. (Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, published in 1989, was another reference.) The Sept. 23, 1991 cover story for Newsweek exemplified this trend in mainstream media: “Was Cleopatra Black: Fact or Fantasies—A Debate Rages over What to Teach Our Kids About their Roots.”

For the radio special on WBAI, 99.5 FM in New York City, I convened an array of guests, both for and against Afrocentrism. The first iteration of “The Afrocentricity Debate,” a live broadcast during a fundraising period, exceeded the target goal of $5,000, so producing a Part Two made sense. Appiah joined me and the host, Playthell Benjamin, in the studio. What I remember most, more than anything specific he said, was Appiah’s laid-back style, his behind-the-beat Brit-accented brilliance, and his seemingly effortless erudition. Before long, it dawned on me that I was in the presence of a genius.

So, Appiah’s work and ideas became a part of my intellectual diet. His critique of Afrocentrism as a sort of inverted mirror-image of Eurocentrism helped me grow beyond what I now view as a romantic ideology. His advocacy of “rooted cosmopolitanism” became a pillar of my own worldview, which I’ve written about and discussed on this blog and elsewhere. And his critique of racial ideology has emboldened my own.

Having the chance to, decades later, engage in a public conversation on the podcast that I co-host was, then, an honor and privilege. Here’s an episode summary:

Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian-born, half-British, rooted cosmopolitan American citizen whose free mind travels across space and time in search of understanding. In this week's episode of Straight Ahead: The Omni-American Podcast, hosts Greg Thomas and Aryeh Tepper are joined by Appiah, a celebrated philosopher, author, President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Ethics commentator in the New York Times Magazine for a conversation that ranges from John Dewey and Cornel West to Confucius and Al-Ghazali, while exploring the meanings of philosophy, Afrocentricity, and the limits of race. The discussion also considers the necessity of understanding intolerant forms of universalism, such as Political Islam.

I invite you to watch this wide-ranging conversation. The most intriguing parts, for me, are the stories Appiah tells of his own life and experience, which ground his ideas in, as he describes it during the discussion, the “things that truly matter.”