Appiah Fractured Identities Summary

Conclusion Response to Appiah’s “Racial Identities”

Kwame Anthony Appiah, an outstanding writer, voices his opinion on the subject of our culture and racism in his essay, “Racial Identities.” Appiah’s conclusion has a lot of meaning to itself along with a sense of explanation. He says, “So here are my positive proposals: live with fractured identities; engage in identity play; find solidarity, yes, but recognize contingency, and above all, practice irony.” Moreover, these positive proposals are Appiah’s ideas to help guide our lives in a positive way. To live with fractured identities and learn to understand the unpredictable. To engage in identity play and test ourselves to new abilities while learning to testing our identity. Finding

When Appiah says, “positive proposals,” to me, it’s his way of informing us that he has his own views on life. That these “proposals” are his own ideas of what, we as people should attend to. Living with fractured identities would be his first. Now what does that mean and why does it apply to the context? A fractured identity, for example, would be a man who studied politics in college, but hates to vote and only wears jeans. This man’s identity is fractured because it’s completely different than other people’s views of a politician. Yes, he studied politics, but what politic doesn’t like to vote? Also, shouldn’t he learn to wear dress pants other than jeans? Some would think of this man as a weirdo who doesn’t fit into our cultural norms, or someone who is unpredictable. When Appiah says, “live with fractured identities,” I assume he means to understand the unthinkable and realize the beauty of other possibilities. I remember having a friend in high school who had a fractured identity. He loved to dress up for school almost every single day except it was always different types of classy clothing. He never wore just a suit and tie, but other crazy outfits that always left people staring and wondering what he was going to wear next. Sometimes, it’d totally shock people when he would come to school wearing sweat pants because people just never knew what to expect from

Defining solidarity by the context of Appiah’s essay, I would say the meaning of this is to find where you belong relating to your beliefs. To overcome your obstacles of life by realizing who you are on the inside and the out, while finding others with mutual feelings you can relate to. The reason something like this is important is because we all are in search for others who believe in the same things we do. This builds unity and stronger relations between individuals, thus creating in someways, a culture of its own. An example of its context would be, “Most of us remember 9/11 in solidarity.” What this technically means, is that majority of us americans, share the same beliefs and feelings over what happened on that day. We share solidarity because majority of us feel the same way. Finding solidarity brings us together as a group and as a culture and what Appiah means, or why I assume he believes it’s important, is because without solidarity, we are all individuals wandering this world without answers to our questions. Without questions to our answers could be misleading, while becoming more close-minded with nothing to relate our own thoughts nor beliefs to anything similar nor different. Solidarity builds structure along with hope. It shows cultures what is right and what is wrong in the context of a situation. Solidarity is what brings people together by uniting them through similarities and by answering