African-American studies does not come "naturally" to Kwame Anthony Appiah, who came to Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department last year.

"I had to learn African-American studies," he says. "You don't intuitively know the way American culture sees race."

A scholar who deflates conventional notions of racial, ethnic and cultural categorizations, Appiah's' life story appropriately puts just those notions into question. Born in London, he spent his childhood in the West African nation of Ghana. His mother is English, his father a Ghanian lawyer who was influential in his country's independence movement. Otumfuo Nana Opoku Ware II, the King of the Asante tribe, is his uncle, and his maternal grandparents are a titled couple from Gloucestershire.

"I must have thought about [race] somewhat--my mother's English, my father Ghanian. Somebody must have mentioned it," he says. "But I don't remember thinking about it a great deal before I came to this country. And I remember being brought up to think that what people said about it was generally such rubbish."

Appiah speaks softly in a British accent, and is immensely understated about his background and his achievements. Most of the time he talks at a languid, thoughtful pace, but occasionally the words rush out in the sort of complex sentences most people can only compose with pen and paper in hand. Talking about his years as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, he shows a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor.

"It was very boring," he says of his brief time as a pre-med. "I decided pretty quickly that it was only worth doing something that boring if you wanted to be a doctor. I've still got a smattering of medical knowledge lodged somewhere at the bottom of my cerebellum."

Appiah switched his major to philosophy, and later earned a doctorate in linguistics. It was at Cambridge that he met and befriended Henry Louis Gates Jr., then a fellow at the English college. the two would later teach together at Yale, Cornell, Duke and now Harvard. Gates encouraged Appiah to study African-American history and culture. At Yale, Appiah did joint work in African-American and African studies.

When he arrived in America, Appiah was intrigued by the racial questions that been so important in defining the character of society here. As a philosopher, African-American studies attracted him because of the ethical dilemmas of a nation dealing with its own racism. He was also excited about studying neglected African-American thinkers and artists, exploring how they have responded to that history of prejudice.

And he was struck by the contemporary reality of African-American culture.

"I was interested in the positive things, such as the character of the reception I felt I got from African-Americans," he says. "There was a kind of assumption, false or not it didn't matter, that I was a part of something. The experiences of race are not entirely negative; race is also a basis for solidarity."

Still, Appiah feels "race" is a category we can do without, He rarely uses the word without quotation marks around it, and calls it a biologically meaningless, even dangerous method of classifying people. The notion that people of the African diaspora are united by a common "racial" heritage is a fiction invented by the Western mind, he says.

"The intellectual attraction of race was that it was this one thing that bound all people of African descent together, and in the name of it you could...handle nation building, literature, philosophy, everything. It doesn't work."

In his new book, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Appiah also rejects the idea that "Africa" is a cohesive entity, a place whose ethos can be distilled or whose people can be grouped.

"Whatever Africans share, we do not have a common traditional culture, common languages, a common religious or conceptual vocabulary," he writes.

And he says Americans of all colors understand too little about this complex continent.