‘Mother-of-five Windrush kid in UK for 50 YEARS branded illegal immigrant’, ‘Brits born in Caribbean are fired, denied NHS care and could be deported’, read the headlines in The Sun newspaper. The political crisis over the deportations of people who came to the UK between 1948 and 1971 from the Caribbean has changed the discourse on immigration in the UK. Is the British identity being redefined, as a result? We asked leading theorist of cosmopolitanism Kwame Anthony Appiah to comment on the case. Raised by a Ghanaian father and an English mother in the UK, and now living in the US, where he is professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Appiah discusses how public attitudes to race and national identity have transformed over his and his father’s lives, and whether cosmopolitanism can be a solution for all.

—Paula Erizanu

PE: What were your first thoughts when you read about the Windrush crisis?

KAA: I suppose I thought that at that time between the late 1940s and the early 1950s when those Caribbean people first arrived, my father was in England, and he was a West African; a black man. His own experience was pretty good. He felt that he was treated respectfully, mostly, by the white British people he interacted with. He had good memories of that time.