To think of oneself primarily as a human being is to discount, in some way, the significance of the divisions we otherwise maintain between people. It will be an important part of my argument, however, that it does not mean setting all those divisions aside. I argue that the politics of the human requires us precisely to address the divisions. It is not that one is human instead of being male or female, boss or worker, Ashanti or Fante, Christian, Muslim, or Jew, and that we can therefore ignore the salience of those more specific identifiers in order to focus on our shared humanity. The point, rather, is that none of the distinctions and divisions should prevent us from claiming our equality and being accepted as full equals. Where they do – where the other identifiers get in the way of equality – this points to urgent political tasks. Being human is not a matter of imaginatively discounting the significance of the barriers that have been erected between us, but then leaving those barriers in place. It is not the warm feeling one might get when discovering that people unlike us in every conceivable way nonetheless do things in a characteristically human manner. If those people still have power over us or we over them, we are not yet engaging fully with what it means for us both to be human beings. I do not mean by this that it is meaningless or dishonest to talk of us all being human so long as societies fall short of equality in power. If that were my argument, I would have to postpone the use of the term indefinitely, and probably for ever. My concern is with the tricky way in which notions of the human do indeed call on us to discount the significance of the divisions we maintain between us, and the danger that in doing so they encourage us to set those divisions entirely to one side.