“We were creatures of great privilege, and that meant we had great obligations. That you couldn’t take as much as we had been given from the world without having a duty to give back.” Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah grew up between two places. Born in London, raised in Ghana, and educated in England. The society wedding of his parents, Joseph Appiah, a lawyer, politician, and diplomat from Ghana, and the novelist and children’s writer Peggy Cripps, whose father had been Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, had been widely covered in the international press a year earlier and is said to have been one of the inspirations for the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. To say that Anthony was born into an unusual family would be an understatement.
Educated in Ghana and England, he earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, then went on to teach at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and NYU. Appiah has taught philosophy on three continents. His early publications include two books in philosophy of language, the area of his dissertation at Cambridge-Assertion and Conditionals (1985) and For Truth in Semantics (1986)-and an introduction to philosophy, Necessary Questions (1989). In the 1990s, he turned his attention to African studies, publishing the much-acclaimed, In My Father’s House (1992), an exploration of the role of African and African American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. In My Father’s House won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Herskovitz Award of the African Studies Association for “the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English.” 2002 began a period of extraordinary productivity for Appiah. He published Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (2003), an annotated edition of 7,500 proverbs in Twi, the language of Asante, a book he co-authored with his mother; Thinking It Through (2004), an introduction to the different areas of philosophy; The Ethics of Identity (2005); Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006); Experiments in Ethics (2008); and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010). His books have been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. In December 2010, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 global thinkers, and in 2012 President Obama presented him with the National Humanities Medal.
These are firsthand accounts of excellent leaders in their field with TBE President Adam P. Kennedy.
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CHAPTER GUIDE:
00:00 Introduction
00:13 What was your upbringing like?
27:03 What were your family's interactions with Kwame Nkrumah?
42:39 SPONSORSHIP
42:47 How did your father's actions impact your family’s life?
44:57 Did you have other role models that inspired you outside your family?
47:46 Looking back on their influence, what lessons did you learn?
53:30 How did the Civil Rights Movement impact your family outside the US and form your impression of Race in America?
1:00:42 Thinking about racism in America compared to England, were they similar or quite different?
1:08:03 Final Thoughts
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