The New Jim Code: Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society
- Dr. Ruha Benjamin | Professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab
- Race and Technology: A Research Lecture Series
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin presents the concept of the “New Jim Code” to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. This presentation takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with historical and sociological insight. Ruha will also consider how race itself is a tool designed to naturalize social hierarchies and, in doing so, she challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.
Learning Materials
- Publication: Assessing risk, automating racism, 2019
- Book: Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, 2019
- Book: People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, 2013
- Book: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 2019
- Podcast appearance: Technology and Race with Ruha Benjamin | Factually! with Adam Conover, 2020
- Podcast appearance: Why tech made racial injustice worse, and how to fix it | CNET’s Now What Podcast, 2020
Learn more about the Race and Technology Research Lecture Series >
Speaker Details
Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and author of two books, People’s Science and Race After Technology, which was awarded Brooklyn Public Library’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize. She’s also the editor of Captivating Technology. She’s currently working on her fourth book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want. She speaks widely about the relationship between innovation, inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice. For more info, visit www.ruhabenjamin.com (opens in new tab)
Series: Race and Technology: A Research Lecture Series
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Beyond the Technology: The Need for Identity-Inclusive Computing Education
- Dr. A. Nicki Washington
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“Freedom Dreams”: Imagining Inclusive Technology Futures through Co-Design with Black Americans
- Dr. Christina N. Harrington
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Designing an AI-driven Neighborhood Navigator with Black and Latinx NYC Residents
- Dr. Desmond Upton Patton
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Building with, not for: Case Studies of Community-Driven Employment Innovations
- Dr. Tawanna Dillahunt
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Intersectional Tech: Black Praxis in Digital Gaming
- Dr. Kishonna L. Gray
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Towards a New Biology Nexus: Race, Society and Story in the Science of Life
- Dr. C. Brandon Ogbunu
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Our Genomes, Our Selves?
- Dr. Sohini Ramachandran
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On Race and Technoculture
- Dr. André Brock
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Women of Color and the Digital Labor of Repair
- Dr. Lisa Nakamura
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