In a time where the concept of diversity has become weaponized to attack equity initiatives in academia and across society, it is imperative to explore and analyze the recent history of the varied uses of “diversity” over time and in varied domains. Everybody, it seems, has something to say about diversity these days. An entire multi-billion-dollar industry has grown around the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). There are untold numbers of books and articles examining the subject from multiple perspectives debating its purported merits or deficiencies. Billionaires go on social media tirades about the subject. Politicians try to get the very word banned from government discourse. In my new book, The Uses of Diversity: How Race Has Become Entangled in Law, Politics, and Biology (Columbia University Press, 2025), I aim not to add to this cacophony but to consider diversity from another angle – as a distinctive site where understandings of race as biological or social have periodically become entangled in highly problematic ways that threaten to undermine initiatives to address racial injustice and 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 the domains of law, politics and commerce but also in the biological sciences, particularly genomics. Thus, even as diversity has played an increasingly prominent role in contentious political debates of recent years, 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 areas using the concept of diversity 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 in ways that produce misguided constructions of race as biological or misapply understandings of biology in legal or political contexts to undermine initiatives intended to understand and address persistent issues of racial inequality and injustice.

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-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 non-scientific, and therefore legally invalid, categories. The lesson here is that the entanglement of race and biology withing 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 variously used to dismantle or reinforce (and sometimes reinvent) racial hierarchies. I undertook this book to explore the immediate modern roots of this entanglement and trace it up to the present.

The story begins at Harvard in the early 1970s, where eminent Marxist professor Richard Lewontin was laying the foundations for modern understandings of human genetic diversity with his foundational article showing that there was more genetic variation within what we call “races” than between them. Meanwhile, a few blocks away at Harvard Law School, scion of the East Coast establishment Archibald Cox, having recently been fired by President Nixon from his post as special Watergate prosecutor, was working on a Supreme Court brief that would ultimately provide the basis for the articulation of modern legal conceptualizations of social diversity in the foundational case of Bakke v. Board of Regents of the University of California. Over the ensuing 50-odd years we see these concepts engaged in a sort of dance around each other, sometimes being discussed in creative juxtaposition, other times becoming dangerously entangled.

More recently, in our response to the COVID pandemic, misunderstandings of the relation between social and biological diversity sidetracked efforts to deliver appropriate care and delayed the development of a vaccine as calls to racially “diversify” clinical trials slowed down enrollment, even though no had vaccine had ever been shown to act differently based on race or ethnicity. The result of these otherwise well-intentioned efforts was to unnecessarily racialize the pandemic in ways that all too unfortunately echoed past conflations of race and disease.

There are no easy solutions to the issues I have identified here, but I do have some modest suggestions, particularly to guide the responsible use of racial categories at the intersection of law, politics and biomedicine. I use the word “modest” advisedly because one of the primary things needed in this arena is a measure of humility in recognizing the complexity of the problem:

• Adopt a skeptical attitude toward any hypothesized but not yet proven causal link between genetics and health disparities. Understanding genetic contributions to disease is quite distinct from understanding genetic contributions to disease disparities. Do not confuse or conflate the two.
• When social, historical, legal and economic factors are clearly shown to be significant contributors to an observed disparity, adopt a null hypothesis approach assuming that such disparities are NOT driven by genetics until proven otherwise.
• When seeking to diversify clinical trials, particularly under emergent circumstances, clearly distinguish between social or political reasons for inclusion — such as encouraging trust or increasing equitable access to therapies — versus biological or genetic reasons, such as concerns about generalizability or genetically based differential responses to safety or efficacy.
• Do not assume that the mere substitution of terms such as “genetic ancestry” for race will solve any of these problems. In practice, genetic ancestry all too readily becomes continental ancestry which, in turn, blurs back into racial classifications. If you use terms such as “genetic ancestry,” be specific about precisely what you mean by this term and how it is being used to construct groupings among present-day populations.
• Understand that calling race “social” does not mean that it is not real.  Legal and political classifications using racial categories, if used carefully and responsibly, can be necessary components of initiative to promote racial justice.

In these ways and others, we can begin to move forward with a clearer understanding of race and stop deploying it in ways that threaten and undermine efforts to address racial injustice.

March 2026