BOOK CLUB: RACE AFTER TECHNOLOGY
On November 9th, the Communication Studies Speaker Series, in collaboration with the Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) Event Series, is hosting a Book Club meeting where we will read and discuss Ruha Benjamin’s book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019).
The e-copy of this book is free to the Northwestern community through our library: https://tinyurl.com/ruhabenjaminnu.
"BOOK ABSTRACT:
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.
Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs 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. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.
This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Race After Technology is the 2020 winner of the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award (for anti-racist scholarship) from the American Sociological Association Section on Race & Ethnic Minorities, and it was also awarded an Honorable Mention from the Communications, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) Book Award in 2020.
RUHA BENJAMIN is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. She is also the founder of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab and the author of two books, People’s Science (Stanford) and Race After Technology (Polity), and editor of Captivating Technology (Duke). Benjamin writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice."