In this episode of The Campus Exchange, AEI visiting fellows Michael Brendan Dougherty and Thomas Chatterton Williams talk with students at Furman University about how we construct our identities and form a sense of belonging in America. The rise of identity politics and nationalism raise important questions. How can we appreciate identity categories without letting them limit our individuality? How can collective identities bring us outside of ourselves, and how can they cut us off from others? Williams discusses his experience as a mixed-race person, and why he has come to believe that defeating racism necessitates abandoning racial categories. Dougherty shares his search for identity as an Irish-American, and how his own exploration of his ethnic identity brought him to appreciate unchosen attachments of social life.

-AEI Executive Council Program

-AEI for Students