Identity Politics in New York

In a special edition of Start the Week recorded in New York, Tom Sutcliffe explores the impact of identity politics in America. This year's BBC Reith Lecturer Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the shifting sands of identity through creed, country, colour and culture, and considers the mistakes we make when we think of them as fixed. The US best-selling novelist Colson Whitehead turns to the question of race, the founding of America, and the history of slavery with The Underground Railroad. The political commentator Heather Mac Donald describes herself as a secular conservative and warns that race-based attacks on the criminal justice system are eroding the authority of the law and putting more lives at risk, while the lawyer Jim Zirin attacks the make-up of the Supreme Court, arguing that the judges are informed more by their political identity, than Constitutional law.
Producer: Katy Hickman.