my guest today is kwame antony appiah, an academic and public intellectual, who says we need to rethinkntity 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 gh