Jonathan Kahn on The Uses of Diversity
In a time when the concept of diversity has been weaponized to attack equity initiatives in academia and across society, it is imperative to explore and analyze the varied uses of “diversity” in recent history and varied domains.
Everybody, it seems, has something to say about diversity these days. An entire multibillion-dollar industry has grown around “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). There are untold numbers of books and articles that examine the subject from multiple perspectives, debating its purported merits or deficiencies. Billionaires go on social media tirades about it. Politicians try to get the very word banned from government discourse. My concern here is not to add to this cacophony but to consider diversity from another angle: as a distinctive area where understandings of race as biological or social have periodically become entangled in highly problematic ways that threaten to undermine initiatives addressing racial injustice and that reinforce dangerously misguided understandings of racial hierarchy. Diversity serves a special role here precisely because, over the past half century, it has become a central organizing concept not only in law, politics, and commerce but also in the biological sciences, particularly genomics. Thus, even as diversity plays an increasingly prominent role in contentious political debates, 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 fields using the concept 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 as a means to produce misguided constructions of race as biological or misapply understandings of biology in legal or political contexts to stymie endeavours intended to deal with persistent issues of racial inequality and injustice.
Diversity has become a prime site for slippage across these domains, with actors from all fields using the concept in ways that blur the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation.
One might think that the biologization of race, with its eugenic overtones, is 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 construction in order to challenge affirmative action and related programs as non-scientific, 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, we gain insights into how diversity can be variously used to dismantle or reinforce (and sometimes reinvent) racial hierarchies. I undertook the writing of The Uses of Diversity to explore the immediate modern roots of such entanglements and trace them up to the present.
The story begins at Harvard in the early 1970s, where the eminent Marxist professor Richard Lewontin was laying the foundations for modern understandings of human genetic diversity. In a foundational article, he showed that there was more genetic variation within what we call “races” than between them. Meanwhile, a few blocks away at the Harvard Law School, Archibald Cox—a scion of the East Coast establishment who had been fired by President Richard Nixon from his post as special Watergate prosecutor— was working on a Supreme Court brief that would ultimately provide the basis for modern legal conceptualizations of social diversity; this case would be Bakke v. Board of Regents of the University of California. Over the ensuing fifty-odd years, we see these concepts of diversity engaged in a sort of dance around each other, sometimes discussed in creative juxtaposition, at other times dangerously entwined. Bringing us up to the present moment, I consider what lessons we may draw from this story while providing an extended case-study of the uses (and misuses) of diversity during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jonathan Kahn is a professor of law and biology at Northeastern University and the author of The Uses of Diversity: How Race Has Become Entangled in Law, Politics, and Biology.