Full Description
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.
Contents
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
