Word: appiah
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...