For those who didn’t have time to read Appiah’s report, this is a balanced overview and assessment. An excerpt:

The most trenchant of the report’s methodological critiques is on “identity as a basis for criticism.” Appiah prosecutes an attack on a deformed version of standpoint epistemology by which, in the words of the anthropologist David Stoll, an identitarian “truth-standard” replaces other, more legitimate criteria of knowledge. “When a claim that is widely accepted among people who work on, say, Black literature or feminist criticism,” Appiah writes, “is contested by a white person or a man, the identity of the person making the claim is sometimes invoked in the criticism.” A related phenomenon: “I have also seen people criticized because there is a mismatch between their identity and their subject. So criticism of scholars who are white, male, straight, or cis by scholars … who are Black or female or LGBTQ does sometimes reflect a suspicion that the former are very unlikely to ‘get’ questions that are in some sense about the identities of the latter.”

Appiah is unequivocal: Such arguments from identity, like assertions of ethnic ownership of a field or topic and accusations of bigotry or bias meant to diminish a rival’s argumentative standing, are categorically inappropriate. When they become common in any field, that field suffers.

We have seen some of this same mindless stupidity in academic philosophy.