Let’s begin by looking at Appiah’s account. In his book The Ethics of Identity, Appiah proposes an understanding of social identity that does not distinguish between what we have been calling ‘psychological’ iden-tity and ‘social’ ideniden-tity. His view can be broken down into roughly two parts: kinds of persons, understood as ‘ways of being’, and identification with those kinds.
Appiah emphasizes that each of us, in the one life that we have to live, is faced with certain constraints on the kind of persons we can be, and that these constraints shape our social identities. Says Appiah:
In constructing an identity, one draws, among other things, on the kinds of person available in one’s society. Of course, there is not just one way that gay or straight people [etc.] are to be-have, but there are ideas around...about how gay [or] straight [etc.] people ought to conduct themselves. These notions pro-vide loose norms or models, which play a role in shaping our plans of life. [Social] identities, in short, provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their projects and in telling their life stories. (p. 21-2)
On Appiah’s picture, then, to have a social identity requires modeling one’s life according to a shared narrative about how a certain kind of person’s life ought to go, be it a woman, a black person, a lesbian, a philosopher, or an American. To construct a social identity is to use the corresponding narrative as a “norm or model” for one’s life.
Regarding kinds of persons, Appiah follows Ian Hacking in think-ing that, in order to intentionally act as (e.g.) a woman, an American, etc., one must bear the label associated with that group and understand one’s actions under a description employing that label. And because (as mentioned above) Appiah understands the construction of a social identity as using a particular narrative as a norm or guide for one’s life, intentionally acting in accordance with these narratives is a necessary condition for creating a social identity. For this reason, Appiah argues that labels “mold” identification, because it is by referencing these labels that people think that something-or-other is appropriate to being (e.g.) a woman, an American, etc.
In sum, on Appiah’s view, by internalizing social group labels that we bear as part of our identities — and so, shaping our lives in accordance with the narratives associated with these labels — we come to have social identities.
4.5.2 Response
We agree with much of Appiah’s view on social identities. For ex-ample, we agree with Appiah that social identities involve identification with a certain social group. We also agree that social identities are agen-tial in that they involve more than mere internal identification with a group — they also involve taking certain actions that express that inter-nal identification.
Despite these substantial points of agreement, there are two impor-tant respects in which we think that Appiah’s account of social identities
frustrate the proposed purposes for the concept of social identity.
The first concerns Appiah’s requirement that one bear the label of the group that one socially identifies with. This requirement, as Appiah notes later, means that one belongs to the group of persons that one identifies with, and is seen by others as belonging to that group.
This requirement on possessing a social identity has two negative ef-fects. To see this, consider two kinds of cases:
1. Someone identifies with a certain group, but is restricted because of (e.g.) social discrimination from joining it, and
2. Someone identifies with and belongs to a certain group, but is not acknowledged as belonging to the group.
Examples of the first sort of case might include (e.g.) a young boy who identifies as a dancer, but is then prevented from dancing by his parents, or someone like Rachel Dolezal, who (for a period of time) both iden-tified as and was taken to be black, but was not in fact black. Examples of the second sort of cases might include (e.g.) a bisexual woman who identifies as bisexual, but is presumed to be straight because she is dat-ing a man, or a light-skinned black person who identifies as black, but is presumed to be white by others.
The first thing to notice is that Appiah is unable to explain these seemingly paradigm cases of social identity. On his account, none of the people in the above cases in fact have the social identity that they appear to have. The second and related thing to notice is that, in these cases, Appiah’s view might be used to justify dismissing persons’ iden-tities as delusional or insignificant. Take, for example, the case of a
bi-sexual woman who is assume by others to be straight because of dating a man. Her social identity, on Appiah’s view, must be different than her social identity would be if (e.g.) she were single and others took her at her word when she said that she is bisexual. But it is undeniably im-portant as a matter of justice that her social identity can be the same, regardless of whether that social identity has uptake.
Our second point of concern lies with Appiah’s severe restriction of the number of available social identities. The reason for this restriction lies in the connection Appiah makes between social identities and ‘ways of being’ or ‘kinds of person’. On Appiah’s view, the other available social identities are identities corresponding to kinds of persons. But the only kinds of persons are those kinds for whom we have a denoting term in public discourse.
We think that there is good reason to not restrict social identities to ones formed in response to a person’s being attributed (and self-attributing) a publicly available label. This view prevents Appiah from capturing cases of social identity when there is no widely-recognized social group, because a social movement is in its early stages. No doubt, the first per-sons to identify as transgender or feminist found themselves in this po-sition. Regardless of whether they had a label associated with their iden-tity, and regardless of the fact that there was no culturally shared nar-rative for that identity, they began social movements by forging new narratives, and so new social groups. That is, these social identities were formed (in part) as an attempt to change the available social roles, and not in response to pre-established roles. Not only does this failure con-flict with our intuitions about seemingly paradigm cases of social
iden-tity, but they additionally undercut the political importance of respect-ing social identities when possible and permissible.