Word: appiah
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...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...
...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...
...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...