a greater risk to humanity than ever before. she told an international conference on climate change that this year was going to be one of the four hottest on record. the frenchjustice minister has promised that the courts will be tough on people who resorted to violence in anti—government protests on saturday. the paris police chief said ball bearings and hammers were thrown at the security forces. nearly 400 people were arrested. shares have opened higher on asian and pacific markets, after the united states and china agreed to suspend the imposition of new tariffs in their escalating trade war. analysts say the upturn reflects a sense of relief that presidents donald trump and xijinping agreed to lower the temperature of their dispute and continue talking. now on bbc news, it's hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur.

what gives each of us our sense of who we are? at the most personal level, we all have our own family background. in the most general sense, we are, all of us, part of the human species. but it's the stuff in between that puts us in groups or tribes, and often motivates our behaviour. gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality — these are the persistent fault lines that seem to separate us from them. my guest today is kwame antony appiah, an academic and public intellectual, who says we need to rethink identity to escape the myths of the past. but how? kwame antony appiah, welcome to hardtalk. good, good to be here. you have spent a great deal of your recent professional life thinking about identity and how each and every one of us labels ourselves. so let's start with a simple question, how do you label yourself?

it depends a little bit on who i'm talking to. taxi drivers, usually i explain that i'm half ghanaian and half british by origin and that i live in the united states. that's the — that gives me three countries to talk about in terms of sort of national origin. so you, when you describe where you're from and the sort of mixedness of your identity, are those signifiers? are you thinking that you're sending signals to your interlocutor about who you are? yes, i think i'm sending signals, i think they're, as it were, weak signals from a faraway planet or something, because they don't tell you as much as i think many people assume they will. so, i grew up in ghana, my father was ghanaian, but that doesn't tell you very much about how interested i am in ghana, it doesn't tell you how much i know about ghana, since i haven't lived there for 30 years, and so on. so i think, and i'm — many people it would be more informative to know

what their nationality is, you know, if... pretty quickly in a conversation, i think you move beyond the stereotypes into more detail, and then it doesn't matter so much that it's not all that helpful. would it be too simplistic to say that in all of your work on race, religion or creed, as you put it, on gender and all of the different ways that we can identify ourselves, and do identify ourselves and others, your conclusion is that frankly, we are all so complex and so unique that almost any label we apply is in some way or other misleading? i think that's right, because the — if you take any of the big labels, the race, religion, nationality, even class, in all of those, there's so much diversity within them. you know, men are all so — men are not all the same, men are very different from one another, women are very different from one another, people in britain are different from one another, people in london are different from one another, in a million ways. so that being told that somebody‘s a londoner doesn't actually give you a huge grip on anything very important about them, which doesn't mean that there aren't

moments where being a londoner isn't hugely important to people. there are mayoral elections, it's important if you're a londoner when the mayor is being elected. if there were a big — as there have been in the past — terrorist attack in london, that would bring londoners together in the sense that 0k, we're all facing this together. but it wouldn't tell you very much about food, language, politics, it wouldn't tell you about lots of things. let's unpick it in a sense, sort of strand by strand, and let's start if i may with race, because as you've already made clear you're the product of a mixed marriage... yeah. ghanaian dad, english mother, rather aristocratic mother. yes. i've chosen race first because in a way, your writings on race have been some of your most controversial, because going quite a long way back, pretty much 30 years,

you did write this, you said "the truth is that there are no races", and you sort of indicated that the whole idea we have of race racial distinction is a sort of false construct, that is more than anything else a product of men in power in the 19th century sort of trying to divide up the world and its races in a way that suited them. yeah, i think that's right, and i think... so you don't believe in race as a...? i think one should distinguish between whether what people believe about the species and its subdivisions — and i think most of that's false, i think most of what people believe about how you should — houw you can divide people up in terms of the bodies they have and the parents and the skulls and so on, and the genetics, i think most of that is sort of mildly off. so no useful racial distinctions and differentiations can be made? not for — no, i don't think so, not for biological reasons. you mean because genetically we're all such a mishmash?

we're a mishmash and the — human beings... so, let's do it this way. i think many people think this. they think that as it were in 1492, when columbus set off, there were these four or five major populations, there was the east asian, south asian, european, african, and amerindian populations, and that they had been there for a very long time, not mixing with anybody. and sort of, quote unquote, "pure". and they were sort of pure and separated and they were bounded off from one another, and then with the age of exploration and so on, suddenly all these things were mixed up. that's just not what happened. there's always been, as a biologist might put it, gene flow, genes — people and the genes have been travelling all the time. and we know this because we know that alexander the great took 30,000 people, you know, across great swathes of asia, we know that genghis khan took people across great swathes of the world,

and so on. so i think — but that turns out to have happened many more times than we realise. and i understand that, but i guess in that sense, here where it's difficult for me to see how the well—researched public intellectual, that is you, connects with the ordinary, let's say black person living in southern mississippi, whose like experience tells him that there is such a thing as race and he is a victim of racist attitudes and a systemically racist society. what meaning does your message that race is a false construct have for him orfor her? well, i don't think — i wouldn't start with that person in that situation, though if they wanted to talk to me more, i would point out that the way they're treated there because of the way they look doesn't predict what other — how they would be treated in large other parts of the world. so that where you are in a particular place, race can have a very specific meaning, which is why i would now say they aren't any races but there are racial identities, and those racial identities are shaped by the way people think not everywhere, but

in particular places. so in mississippi right now, the distinction between black and white people is extremely clear, and it remains the case that there's significant differential treatment by the government, by other people, and so on in that place, though there are going to be people even in mississippi who are hard to place. there are going to be people who have say one african ancestor four generations ago, with the rest of them european, who might be thought by some people to belong on the black side in mississippi, and by others to be on the white side. so the boundaries aren't going to be clear even in a place like mississippi, but the consequences of being on one side or the other, those are as clear as anything. and that's why you can't draw from the fact that there aren't any races, you can't draw from that the conclusion that racial

identities don't matter, they matter enormously, but in insisting that they aren't real, i'm pointing out that they're created by these forms of behaviour, by these beliefs, many of which are false, that's why the book's called the lies that bind. but what's created by those... and you would apply the same approach to religion or creed, as you call it, and presumably to sort of gender and politics. yes. imean again... patriarchal politics, underclass politics? yes. so in essence, what you're saying, if i may say so — and this, i don't mean this to sound rude — but it's fairly simple in a way. you're saying that, you know, people in power, which particularly in the 19th century, which was very a important century for all of us, were white men, basically constructed a whole series of different frameworks in which they could explain and perpetuate their own power? yes. i mean, i don't think they were clear that that's what they were doing. if they'd been clear about what they were doing, it wouldn't have been so easy to do. it's much easier to do these things while not accepting that that's what you're doing, but i do think we're living with the legacy of these forms of classification, and i do think that all of them have the serious mistakes built into them which are worth disentangling. at the end of the disentangling, there will still be men and women

and a few people in the world are hard to classify as either. there will still be people who in mississippi are black for all practical purposes, there will still be people who are protestant and catholic in northern ireland, but i think we can — it's important in trying to respond to the problems associated with these identities and to the good things that are associated with identities, it's better to be clear about how they're actually made. but do you find it disappointing that — you know, a couple of years ago, you delivered the rather influential reith lectures here in the uk all about, in a sense, the myths and the false constructs that underpin much of what we think about race and religion and what have you. you've since written this book, the lies that bind, so you're doing your best to explain to all of us from your position as a public intellectual that a lot of what we think about our identities is based upon false premises, and yet, here we sit today, in the early 21st century, with a world that seems more driven by group identity and tribalism and groupthink than ever before. yes, well, at least as, if not...

i mean, certainly, the things i'm reporting in my book, it's not as if i discovered all these things by myself. these are, much of what i say is pretty commonsensical in the world of the sociologist and the philosophers who think about these things. but i suppose my point is that there you — and it's a pejorative term, and again i'm being a little bit disrespectful — but there you sit in your sort of academic ivory tower unpicking all this stuff, and it makes not a blind bit of difference to the way societies work, power is wielded, and the way people think. so, i am going to say something that sounds like an american, i have gotten used to that. laughs. i have gotten used to that. i think — maybe it's worth saying what i think the job of someone like me is. myjob is to provide tools to people to think about these things that are better than the tools they've currently got. myjob is not to tell people what to do, it's not even to tell them how to solve their problems. i don't think of that as what i'm doing, i'm just trying to do

the thing what i'm best at, which is thinking these things through carefully and giving people in what i hope is a manageable form, i hope — i tell stories as well as make arguments, the tools for thinking about it better. but i don't expect it to have a huge impact and if you really — by itself, on the other hand, i think these are useful tools for the people who are trying to make the world better, the activists, the social movement people, those people, i think it's helpful for them to be clearer about their situation and about what the possibilities are. i'll give you just a simple example. if races really were real and if there were really important objective differences between them, then some of the inequalities in the world might persist to the end of time because of that. i am pretty confident that that won't happen once we recognise that the way we treat people is generating a lot of the racial inequality in the world. well, that's a very important caveat, isn't it, once we recognise? yes.

because one might hope that the trajectory of human sort of cognition would be forever upward, but frankly, in the era of donald trump, i'm not editorialising about the trump administration but the fact is that a lot of the messages that come from the president of the united states are clearly appealing to tribe, appealing to group, are divisive and polarising rather than seeking out a universality. yes. how do you interpret what is happening in america today? well, i think that the important thing to see is that the temptation to use simplified pictures of the way the world is divided up to generate support for political campaigns and for political agendas, that's just a feature of the world, and one of the things one tries to do as a political person, i mean in one's life as a citizen trying to think about politics, is to try and undermine and reduce the support for the people who take advantage of this easy mechanism, this mechanism of dividing us into us and them and to create

a kind of solidarity based on false beliefs about what we are like and false beliefs about what they are like. i think those people are dangerous, the world is full of them. so you, i mean this isn'tjust about donald trump... no, no. one could also look at the populism and nativism in europe... italy, hungary, poland. ..with people like matteo salvini, whom i interviewed on hardtalk recently in italy. and you look at viktor 0rban in hungary, you could look at a whole host of people. frankly, you could look beyond the shores of europe too, to india, where the current government uses nationalist and polarising cultural messages. yes... so, but the point you alluded to earlier is that you ultimately are an optimist and you believe that the trajectory of the human condition is, in that positive sense, toward a more universalist

and more humane, understanding, compassionate humanity? yes. how can you square that with what you see? i'm looking at it over a longer horizon. think about how things improved, over the last century. think about the massive improvement in the condition of working class people in many countries. the massive reduction in racial discrimination in the law in the united states over the last 100 years. look at the increasing coming together of europe in the same moments of nationalism and putting brexit to one side one has to do. europe is way more unified and united than it was in the 19th century. or even in the mid—20th century. if you look over a long enough horizon, you can see the general tendency is in the direction i would regard as up. one area that i can see where you would find

solace is certainly in the western world, societies and cultures view of gender issues, and in particular, sexuality. i have known you for a long time, you are an out gay man who took advantage of america's change of laws so you could marry your long—term partner. how far can we go with the notion that human beings are now free to choose their identities in ways we never even thought of before, notjust in terms of sexuality but even in terms of basic gender, where now there is a very powerful movement to change the way, the binary way we see men and women, a lot of people who define themselves as a non—binary, others who are transgendering, and society appears to be slowly moving to accept them in different ways. when does this end? i don't think it ends. there are two things in the report where it doesn't end. it doesn't end with the disappearance of identity. we are reforming our gender system but not getting rid of gender altogether.

i believe over the long haul into the remote future, we still have, it will be more complicated than a simple binary system but there will be men and women and some people in between. where does self—identity end? interestingly, i'm lurching between different spheres but on hardtalk, not so long ago, we spoke to a woman called rachel dolezal, who was a white woman that became an activist of the black community and spoke as a black woman but when people realised eventually that she had two white parents, it became a fascinating and difficult debate about about what being black is. she said, i never identified as white, i feel myself as black,

so to that extent, i am black. she is a good case to think about. you ask what is the relationship between self and others? you have to think of these as a matter of negotiation. you can't simply declare the meaning of race on your own. if you don't like where it's put you, you need to persuade the world to change. that is what trans people have done. trans people did what rachel dolezal didn't do which is create a movement which allows them to be what they want to be in the system. i am happy to respond affirmatively to that request to change the system and it does no harm to me to adapt the system in that way. even if it did a bit of harm to masculinity i would be happy because it's important to them. if rachel dolezal could have made these arguments and persuaded people and done it in a way which was a bit more straightforward, what

she was actually doing, she knew, involved concealing something that other people thought was important. she didn't think it was important and that's an interesting fact but unfortunately, black in america doesn't belong to her so the only way it can be changed in the direction that she wants, and i'm willing to listen to her arguments. is it she makes the arguments, she needs do it with other people. in this interview and in some of your other writings, you're consistently saying it's not yourjob to fix the society, it is simple to understand and explain how societies work to fellow citizens. i get that, but do you have ideas which you can share with me as to how to overcome the lies that currently underpinned our identity? the most important thing for us to overcome, to the extent that

getting rid of the lies helps, i'm in favour of that, the moment when identities lead to hostility and hatred and division. that is what we are looking. for that i think some things can be said but these are things known to social psychologists. don't close yourself off. people who live with diverse identities tend to be less bigoted than those who don't so don't allow yourself to be channelled off into a world in which you are only among white people or among catholics, only among straight people and so on, open your social experience to people of all the major kinds and do things with them that are not about race or religion or sexuality but are about soccer for going to the movies or about building something in your community together. working together, people working together with people of diverse identities makes the identity less dangerous and frankly, if you have false ideas about them,

as long as the ideas aren't leading you to behave badly, i'm not so worried. people have false ideas about everything. we have false ideas about cooking. it doesn't do too much harm, i'm not worried about it. we have a thinker and writer in the united kingdom called david goodhart who says, these days, the most important distinction and identity that one can use when looking at people in western societies is between those he calls anywheres and those he calls somewheres. the anywheres are usually educated, highly mobile people comfortable in their intellectual environment living anywhere in the world. that would be you. the somewheres are deeply rooted

people who are not so mobile, whose thought processes are more localised and not so open and they, according to david goodhart, are much less interested in the kind of ideals that you've just been painting with me. i am happy to live in the world with the somewheres, i just don't want them shaping the world for the rest of us in a way that makes it very difficult for us to do what we want to do. my favourite example is in america, the amish of pennsylvania, they've closed themselves off, they don't like talking to strangers, they don't like money or motorcars or lots of things that i think are inevitable parts of the modern world and they've made a world for themselves. they are entitled to that, theirfreedom is as important as anybody else‘s freedom and they don't do any harm to the rest of us, they don't go out into the world campaigning against the others, they live separately.

i don't mind that. if you want to be a somewhere like that but if you want to be the kind of somewhere that takes over the united states or britain and turn it into a country of somewheres, i am on the other side from you. i'm a live and let live person, i understand the attractions of locality, i remember the pleasures of my grandmother's english village in gloucestershire, it's a lovely place and a perfectly decent life living there all the time, mostly hanging out with people from the village. it is not the life i have chosen and for those who do, that's fine but i don't think they should shape the world in which what i want to do is impossible. and we have to end there. antony appiah, it's been a pleasure having your hardtalk. very nice to talk to you. hello.

more rain for parts of england and wales in the day ahead. tuesday, quieterforall, but then the weather gets pretty busy again from wednesday, as we will see. a chilly start the further north you are as monday begins and in scotland, the risk of ice on untreated services because we had wet weather overnight clearing away, allowing temperatures to dip away. as we go on through the day, this is the area of cloud. showers and outbreaks of rain moving through england and wales, producing heavy bursts, squally winds, south wales and south—west england too. northernmost counties of northern england and northern ireland and much of scotland will stay dry and sunny. 0n the northerly breeze, quite chilly and further showers running into northern scotland. wintry in nature to relatively low ground as we go through the late afternoon evening, but a big range of temperatures, very mild across south wales and southern england, with temperatures approaching the mid—teens. 0n the northerly flow, that colder air filters southwards across all parts into monday night and tuesday morning. we noticed showers around scotland, wintry in nature and a dusting of snow possible and icy patches again, as tuesday begins. but it does look like a widespread frost is going to be the most

noticeable part of tuesday morning and there could be a few fog patches around as well. we know it is going to be cold as tuesday begins, but there will be plenty of sunshine around. temperatures will be held down into single figures, despite the sunshine, after that cold, frosty start and this looks to be the coldest day of the week, more widely speaking. then the weather is about to change once more. notice an area of cloud or rain pushing into the far south—west, while many stay dry during daylight hours, it seems rain approaching in cornwall and devon. this next weather system, the busy part of the week starts to take its wet weather northwards across part of england and wales into northern ireland through tuesday night into wednesday morning. it hasn't finished there either. still some uncertainty about the northern extent, but it could push into parts of scotland, we know there is a cold air in place, we could see snow on the hills out of that

and still big a range of temperatures north to south across the uk, northern scotland more likely to stay dry and avoid this weather system. there will be another one coming in from the atlantic as we go through thursday, the rain does not look too heavy and by the end of the week, a deepening area of low pressure system weather but also stronger wind, gales or severe gales in places as we go into friday. yes, looking pretty busy from wednesday onwards, but it is particularly on friday that there is a risk of seeing some disruptive winds. still chilly in the north, mild in the south. bye bye. this is the briefing. i'm sally bundock. our top story: rising sea levels fuelling rising anger — leaders of four of the most under—threat countries will make an impassioned plea as a crucial climate summit opens in poland. a crunch week for theresa

may's brexit deal. 0pposition parties call for closer scrutiny of her withdrawal agreement. shock in spain — a far—right party has won seats for the first time since military rule under the dictator francisco franco. down on one knee, then down the drain — social media sleuths help track down the couple whose engagement ring fell down a grate in times square. share markets rally in asia as the world's two biggest economies