Henry Austin
henryaustin@hks.harvard.edu
A White man in Washington State tries to use the results of his DNA ancestry test to claim access to minority set-aside contracts. A conservative federal Circuit Court judge in Texas invokes the work of an anti-racist evolutionary biologist to argue that since race is not genetic then racial categories are arbitrary and cannot be used as legitimate legal classifications for affirmative action programs. In these cases, and others, genetic knowledge is increasingly being weaponized to make legal and political claims to racial identity in ways that have profound implications for race and the law.
New genetic technologies do not resolve these legal and political issues. They become, rather, a terrain upon which long standing debates are carried out in new ways. Or perhaps they are better understood as both already shaped by and in turn shaping these arguments. The scientific impetus to explore the relation between race and genetics cannot be understood apart from evolving understandings of race itself as a means to order social relations and allocate power.
Jonathan Kahn, JD, PhD is a Professor of Law and Biology at Northeastern University. His current research focuses on the entanglements of law and biotechnology, with particular attention to how law intersects with scientific, clinical and commercial practice in producing legal understandings of race and racism in American society. His most recent book is The Uses of Diversity: How Race Has Become Entangled in Law, Politics, and Biology (Columbia University Press, 2025). He is also the author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age and Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Justice.
LOCATION:CGIS South, S354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260420T161500Z DTEND:20260420T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR