The Use of Diversity: Managing Race and Representation in Law, Politics, and the Biosciences

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Project Summary Over the past decade, “diversity” has become a sine qua non of genomic research through such programs as the Precision Medicine Initiative and related efforts to build massive genetic data bases. This book will examine the biomedical, social, legal, commercial, and policy implications of diversity’s emergence as a central organizing concept animating an array of programs and research agendas aimed at driving forward genomic innovation. As diversity has come to the fore as a central organizing concept of modern genomic research and policy, distinctions between social and biological rationales for foregrounding racial categories in genomic enterprises have become conflated, confused, and confounded. Such conceptual entanglements have profound implications both for our on-going understandings of the nature of human similarly/difference and for concomitant allocation of goods, resources, and status relating to race and race-relations in society today. These initiatives present a double-pronged re-reification of race as genetic: First, through the conflation of socially defined racial groups with distinctive and discrete genetic clusters; and Second, through the molecularization of social phenomena that disparately impact racial groups. The former threatens to reinvigorate dangerous, reductive, and racist constructions of race as genetic; the latter threatens to geneticize health disparities themselves, both blaming the victims and directing attention away from the social, legal, and political initiatives that need to be undertaken in order to address such problems. Diversity is a concept ready-made for conflating racial and genetic categories because diversity itself has roots in both worlds. Diversity is a useful concept, but like race itself, it can be hard to define and even harder to use in a productive way that avoids the dangers of genetic essentialism and racial reification. Hence the need to identify and address these challenges in each new manifestation as they arise. To do this, it is necessary to trace the stories of these different forms of diversity through a book-length treatment that will allow for a full exploration and analysis of the complexities of managing race and diversity at the intersections of law, politics, and biomedicine. Having traced the progression of the entanglements of diversities from the 1970s to the present-day, the book will draw practical lessons and propose concrete suggestions for the more careful, deliberate, and productive management of race and representation in the intersecting domains of biomedicine, law, and politics.