Overview

Race, it is widely understood, is a social category that has no genetic basis, yet biological notions of race keep reemerging. Attempts to redress disparities in biomedical research emphasize recruiting racially representative trial participants. Forensic use of DNA evidence purports to pinpoint the race of a potential suspect. Genetic ancestry tracing companies explain test results to customers using racial categories. The makers of genomic databases seek to ensure racial inclusivity. Jonathan Kahn argues that this predicament arises from a surprising source: the concept of diversity. Ranging across law, politics, science, and medicine, he examines the blurring of the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation. Because diversity has become such a central concept across domains, Kahn contends, it enables slippage between these contradictory ideas, entangling biological and social views of race. Tracing the parallel histories of the Human Genome Project, workforce diversification efforts, U. S. Supreme Court cases over affirmative action, the rise of precision medicine, and the COVID-19 vaccine trials, among others, he shows why diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice. Combining incisive critique and interdisciplinary insight, The Uses of Diversity offers bracing new perspective on one of today's most vexed concepts.

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Reviews

Polymath Jonathan Kahn manages to summarize, analyze, and connect recent histories of science, philosophy, and law brilliantly here. He critically examines the concepts of race, diversity, representation, and identity through diverse scholarly lenses, and shows how we got where we are now, with politically inflammatory and occasionally scientific meanings of “diversity” being debated and manipulated in the public forum. As a modern cultural analysis, it is a scholarly triumph! -- Jonathan Marks, author of <i>Understanding Human Diversity</i> and <i>Is Science Racist?</i> All around us, programs for equity and social justice are under attack. Jonathan Kahn’s argument in The Uses of Diversity is the antidote to the poisonous lie that structural racism has never existed. It should be read by every serious thinker and by all who still stand by the creed of equality. -- Joseph L. Graves Jr., coauthor of <i>Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions</i>

Author Information

Jonathan Kahn is a professor of law and biology at Northeastern University. He is the author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age (2013) and Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Justice (2017), both published by Columbia University Press.

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