The Uses of Diversity:
How Race Has Become Entangled in Law, Politics, and Biology
by Jonathan Kahn (Columbia University Press)
In writing a review of the book, the temptation is to rewrite the book’s argument, as the author does a lousy job at doing that clearly. The short version is this is one of those Velvet Underground books, where it is probably for a small audience but for that audience is special; here, like the best scholarship, something that provides many fertile lines of future discussion and research.
The book is about exactly what it says on the tin, but not in the final sense like we usually use the word of talking of the benefits of diversity, but how diversity itself is defined.
That the definition is tricky is the point of the book. Specifically looking at legal interpretations of diversity, usually through anti-discrimination laws (and thus the lawsuits arising from them) the book is about how race and diversity is interchangeable, until it is not; not genetic, except when it is, and usually a product of the tail wagging the dog in terms of categorization, except when the categorization is useful.
If it sounds confusing, that is the point. One of the more interesting refrains in the book is when the author does a close reading of the text of a speech or court decision to observe even in close context how uses of the word will shift. There are malicious versions of this, but most are not.
The ghost at the banquet is racism. In moving away from a legislative approach that acknowledges something like the structural quality of racism, where things moved to was an ideal about diversity as a stand-in. But this legislative car was on a collision course with a scientific train in the form of genetic analysis. But before the conservative pundit that sits on my shoulder (you choose which) can say reals over feels, the book is about how that idea itself is broken. It is not, as is commonly asserted, that genetics actually supports race and racial science, but that you can’t get there from here.
The analogy that I would use is that if you can imagine race as a painting of an orange, then genetics is like an orange tree. You can make a painting of an orange tree, and you can hang the painting on the orange tree, but at no point ever is there an edible fruit.
But the damned spot then is Neoliberal Capitalism (I would also accept Technopoly), since a usefulness to genetics is presumed, and so you end up with a sort of dance of Right and Left and trying to merge science with policy for profit, but in inconsistent ways, always with a focus on the individual as opposed to the system.
My first impression of the book was that it was too technical for me, not due to its obscurity or required background, but because it operates more like a law review article or series of case studies with a blended approach of law, science, and sociology. As such, the utility is to people working in the field. But an arc does appear, that I have tried to sketch out. Still, the point of the arc is more to raise doubts about the arc.
The writing has moments of brilliance, with clever and smart turns of phrase. My fear about the book is a problem that the book describes about other books and how it is hard to discuss the topic without partisans, particularly of the Right, willing to abuse the meaning of it. The topics of the individual chapters are themselves diverse, to the point that it is tempting to review each in turn, as there is lots of fun information contained therein.
In the ‘not so much a question but a comment’ variety, what I felt myself coming back to was the different heuristic side of the thing. This is the JD+history PhD (w/scientist spouse) take. I am as fascinated with the prospect of some of the others, particularly with a literary or linguistic take.
My thanks to the author, Jonathan Kahn, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Columbia University Press, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 