The Uses of Diversity

How Race Has Become Entangled in Law, Politics, and Biology
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-0-231-22013-2
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 16, 432 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Race, Inequality, and Health

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kahn, Jonathan

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Medizinische Ethik
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Menschenrechte, Bürgerrechte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction. Managing the Entanglement
1. The Roots of Modern Diversities
2. Modern Diversities Taking Shape
3. Forensic Diversity
4. Diversity Affirmed in the New Millenium
5. Diversity Machines: Race, Biology, and the Sweet Spot of Racialized Time
6. Getting Bodies: When Diversity Didn’t Matter
7. Bringing Diversity Back In
8. Genetic Entanglements of Sociolegal Diversity in the 2010s
9. Diversity and the Frames of Representation
10. Political Valences of Contemporary Genetic Diversity
Epilogue. Diversity’s Pandemic Distractions: A Case Study of the Contemporary Uses of Diversity
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

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.