The Quotable Black Scholar: K. Anthony Appiah on Multicultural Education

Kwame Anthony Appiah is ranked #5 on the list of the most cited Black scholars in the humanities.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954)

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A multicultural education should be one that leaves you not only knowing and loving what is good in the traditions of your own sub-culture but also understanding and appreciating the traditions of others (and also critically rejecting the worst of all traditions). The principle of selection is clear: we should try to teach about those traditions that have been important to American history. This means that we begin with Native American and Protestant Dutch and English and African and Iberian cultures, adding voices to the story as they were added to the nation.

— Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Beware of Race Pride,” The American Enterprise, September 1995.

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Biographical Notes: Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy & the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He has taught at Duke, Cornell, Harvard, and Yale. He holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. from  Cambridge University in England.  He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including: Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (with Amy Gutmann); The Dictionary of Global Culture (co‑edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr.);  Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (with his mother, the writer Peggy Appiah); Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy; The Ethics of Identity; and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Dr. Appiah has also published three novels, including Avenging Angel, a murder set at Cambridge.

Posted by Ajuan Mance