Kahn, Jonathan The Uses of Diversity: How Race Has Become Entangled in Law, Politics, and Biology Columbia University Press, 432 Pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN: 9780231220149
Jonathan Kahn
On The Uses of Diversity: How Race Has Become Entangled in Law, Politics, and Biology
Interview of
January 13, 2026
In a nutshell
This book examines the blurring of the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation, showing how the concept of diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice. Diversity serves a special role here precisely because, over the past half century, it has become a central organizing concept not only in the domains of law, politics and commerce but also in the biological sciences, particularly genomics. Thus, even as diversity has played an increasingly prominent role in contentious political debates of recent years, it has emerged as a powerful trope framing major undertakings in the biosciences, where, for example, enlisting “diverse” cohorts of research subjects into massive genomic data bases has become a sine qua non of realizing the “promise” of personalized medicine.
Diversity has become a prime site for slippage across these domains, with actors from all areas using the concept of diversity in ways that blur the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation. These entanglements change and manifest differently over time and in different contexts. Managing these entanglements is critical to ensuring that the concept of diversity is not deployed in ways that produce misguided constructions of race as biological or misapply understandings of biology in legal or political contexts to undermine initiatives intended to understand and address persistent issues of racial inequality and injustice.
The story begins at Harvard in the early 1970s, where eminent population geneticist and Marxist professor Richard Lewontin was laying the foundations for modern understandings of human genetic diversity with his foundational article showing that there was more genetic variation within what we call “races” than between them. Meanwhile, a few blocks away at the Law School, scion of the East Coast establishment, Archibald Cox, having recently been fired by President Nixon from his post as Special Watergate Prosecutor, was working on a Supreme Court brief that would ultimately provide the basis for the articulation of modern legal conceptualizations of social diversity in the foundational case of Bakke v. Board of Regents of the University of California. Over the ensuing fifty-odd years we see these concepts engaged in a sort of dance around each other, sometimes being discussed in creative juxtaposition, other times becoming dangerously entangled. Bringing us up to the present moment, the book explores what lessons we may draw from this story while providing an epilogue with an extended case-study of the uses (and misuses) of diversity during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The wide angle
I came to this book through my decades-long engagement with issues at the intersection of race, science, law and justice. I began over thirty years ago by exploring sites of the legal management of identity. This led me into the arena of privacy law and the ways in which it serves as a principle for managing individual identity in the face of intrusive market force and state policies. I then came across the case of John Moore, a cancer patient, who sued the University of California in the 1980s for the unauthorized appropriation of his cells to try to develop a valuable pharmaceutical product. A California Appeals Court characterized this as “appropriation of identity”—the idea being that one’s DNA was core to one’s identity. Although I contested this essentialist characterization of DNA, the case led me to explore the intersection of law, identity, and the biosciences. While engaged in this work in the early 2000s, the sociologist Troy Duster put me on to a related development—the attempts by a biotech startup, NitroMed, to develop the first race specific drug, BiDil. I discovered that this drug, BiDil, was originally intended for people regardless of race but due to considerations of expiring patents, the owners had rebranded it as a race-specific drug in order to extend its patent protection. This became the subject of my book, Race in A Bottle, which explored this story in depth and considered how law and commerce combined to incentivize the characterization of this drug in ways that threatened to biologize race as a genetic construct.
My next book, Race on the Brain, shifted its focus from the dangers of biologizing race, to the dangers of biologizing racism. It examined how a recent focus on implicit bias had evolved from a well-meaning attempt to expand our understanding of the dynamics of discrimination into a master narrative that that obscured the on-going reality of conscious racism, while rendering racism itself as an almost biological cognitive phenomenon that operated primarily in the people’s brains instead in the field of social and historical practice.
While writing Race on the Brain, I became more fully aware of the pervasiveness of the rhetoric of diversity in discussions of racial justice over the past few decades. Having developed a focus on the intersections of law, science, and race, I was also seeing that the concept of diversity has played a central role in human genetic research. I found that these two concepts—one primarily socio-political, the other primarily biological were often entangled in highly problematic ways. By 2019, the National Human Genome Research Institute was highlighting new studies, “Putting Diversity Front and Center.” Many of these discussions focused not only on genetic diversity (as one might expect), but also on social diversity. These initiatives touted not only the need to get more diverse genomes to propel research forward, but also the importance of promoting a diverse workforce, in part to help recruit diverse populations, who presumably would provide the ultimately sought after diverse genomes. This inevitably led to characterizations, first of the workforce, then of bodies, and finally of genomes, in terms of racial and ethnic categories. The entanglement was palpable.
Exploring and untangling these knots is my project here. My goal is both to tell a cautionary tale, urging a greater humility among those deploying these concepts in what is often a cavalier or overconfident manner, and to provide some modest guidance on how best to manage these concepts going forward.
A close-up
The introduction would provide the best sense of what the book covers and what it hopes to accomplish. Here is a quote:
One might have thought that the biologization of race, with its eugenic overtones, was primarily driven by voices from the Right. While this has often been the case, we also see well-meaning liberals implicitly and sometimes explicitly biologizing race, often in attempts to address perceived inequities in the domains of biomedicine and public health. Some conservatives, on the other hand, have embraced the idea that race is a social, not a biological construction, in order to challenge affirmative action and related programs as based on nonscientific, and therefore legally invalid, categories. The lesson here is that the entanglement of race and biology within the frame of diversity does not always serve a single political script or produce reliably conservative or liberal results. Rather, in unknotting that entanglement we gain insights into how diversity can be used in a variety of ways to dismantle or reinforce (and sometimes reinvent) racial hierarchies. And so, I undertook the writing of The Uses of Diversity to explore the immediate, modern roots of this entanglement and trace it up to the present.
Lastly
Exploring and untangling these knots is my project here. My goal is both to tell a cautionary tale, urging a greater humility among those deploying these concepts in what is often a cavalier or overconfident manner, and to provide some modest guidance on how best to manage these concepts going forward.
