The Uses of Diversity

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 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.”

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.