Professor Jonathan Kahn’s Latest Book Untangles Diversity

08.16.25 — Race, it is widely understood, is a social category that has no genetic basis, yet biological notions of race keep reemerging. In The Uses of Diversity: How Race Has Become Entangled in Law, Politics, and Biology (Columbia University Press, 2025), Professor Jonathan Kahn argues that over the past 50 years, the concept of diversity has been deployed in contested and often contradictory ways, serving both liberal and conservative ends, yet often dangerously reifying race as genetic. 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 with an eye to disentangling them so as to facilitate and promote more productive uses of these concepts.

“We’re now seeing that diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice,” says Kahn, who points out that the entanglement of race and biology does not always serve a single political script or produce reliably conservative or liberal results. “It is in unknotting the entanglements that we gain insights into how diversity can be used in ways to reinforce or dismantle racial hierarchies.”

A leading authority on biotechnology’s implications for our ideas of identity, rights and citizenship, with a particular focus on race and justice, Kahn’s previous books include Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Justice (Columbia University Press, 2018), Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Budgeting Democracy: State Building and Citizenship in America, 1890-1928 (Cornell University Press, 1997).