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.