Diversity's Pandemic Distractions

Pandemic diseases have a nasty history of racialization. COVID-19 is no exception. Beyond the obvious racist invocations of the "China virus" or the "Wuhan Flu" are subtler racializing dynamics that are often veiled in more benign motives but are nonetheless deeply problematic. The racialization of COVID-19 proceeded along two distinct trajectories each of which threatened to reinforce inaccurate biologized conceptions of race while diverting attention from the social, legal, and political forces historically structuring race-based health disparities. First, early on as significant racial disparities in disease incidence and mortality became evident, a frame of race-based genetic difference came to the fore as a possible explanation. Second, as vaccine development ramped up there came widespread calls for racially "diversifying" clinical trials for the vaccines being tested. The rationales for such diversification were varied but tended to reinforce genetic frames of racial difference. Most common was the assertion (without substantial evidence) that vaccines might work differently in Black or Brown bodies and so racial diversity in trials was imperative for reasons of safety and efficacy. Derrick Bell cautioned 20 years ago that "the concept of diversity … is a serious distraction in the ongoing efforts to achieve racial justice." (Derrick Bell, Diversity's Distractions, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 1622, 1622 (2003).) This article explores the dynamics of how the concept of "diversity" racialized responses to COVID-19 and considers their broader implications for understanding and responding to racial disparities in the face of pandemic emergencies and beyond. In the short term, vaccine developers did a decent job of enrolling minorities in their clinical trials and the vaccines have proven to have the same safety and efficacy across races. In the long term, diversity in the biomedical context of pandemic response not only distracts attention from important structural causes of health injustice, but it also focuses attention on the genetics of disparities in a manner that has the potential to reinforce pernicious and false ideas of essential biological difference among racial groups. This article argues that an uncritical embrace of the idea of diversity in analyzing and responding to emergent health crises has the potential to distract us from considering deeper historical and structural formations contributing to racial health disparities. It proceeds first by exploring the dynamics through which initial responses to racial disparities in COVID-19 became geneticized. It will then move on to unpack the rationales for such racialization, examine their merits (or lack thereof), and consider their implications for developing an equitable response to pandemic emergencies. The next section will examine the subsequent racialization of clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines through the concept of "diversity." It then moves on to explore how the geneticization of COVID-19 racial disparities laid the foundations for a similar geneticization of race in vaccine development. It will argue that in failing to clearly distinguish social and biological rationales for diversity, such framings, while generally well-intentioned, are poorly supported and work in tandem with the geneticization of racial disparities in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality to locate the causes of disparities in the minds and bodies of minoritized populations; again this distracts attention from the historical and structural forces contributing to such disparities. The article concludes by recognizing a certain intractability to the problems of using race in biomedical research and practice, particularly in the context of public health emergencies. It offers modest suggestions for improvement that could have significant practical effects if taken to heart by researchers, clinicians, and policy makers.