Ruha Benjamin

Over the years, artist and Detroit native Mario Moore (born 1987) has observed that the halls of elite institutions like universities and art museums prominently feature portraits of donors, deans, presidents, board members and scholars, and that the subjects of those portraits are mostly white and male. When Moore was selected as a Princeton University Hodder Fellow in 2018, he wanted to ask what positions garner such attention and how could painting contribute to conversations on who deserves to be recognized. He set out to meet Black men and women who work in and around Princeton University in blue-collar jobs and let the art-making process unfold from their collaborative interactions. In the resulting works, Moore redefines the colonial gaze for the subjects he paints, allowing them to look directly out with an unflinching stare. This publication includes sketches, drawings, etchings and paintings.

Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day. Vividly recounting her personal experiences and those of her family, Benjamin shows how seemingly minor decisions and habits could spread virally and have exponentially positive effects. She recounts her father’s premature death, illuminating the devastating impact of the chronic stress of racism, but she also introduces us to community organizers who are fostering mutual aid and collective healing. Through her brother’s experience with the criminal justice system, we see the trauma caused by policing practices and mass imprisonment, but we also witness family members finding strength as they come together to demand justice for their loved ones. And while her own challenges as a young mother reveal the vast inequities of our healthcare system, Benjamin also describes how the support of doulas and midwives can keep Black mothers and babies alive and well. Born of a stubborn hopefulness, Viral Justice offers a passionate, inspiring, and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world.

"...Under the shadow of the free market and in a nation still at odds with universal healthcare, the socially marginalized are often eagerly embraced as test-subjects, yet often are unable to afford new medicines and treatment regimes as patients. Without more deliberate consideration about how scientific initiatives can and should reflect a wider array of social concerns, stem cell research still risks excluding many. Even as regenerative medicine is described as a participatory science for the people, Benjamin asks us to consider if "the people" ultimately reflects our democratic ideals."--Cover, p. .

"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. Far from a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, Benjamin argues that automation has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to 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 tool a technology designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice that is part of the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements provides conceptual tools to decode 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 manufacture ourselves"-- "Cutting through tech-industry hype, this book explores how emerging technologies reinforce white supremacy. Conceptualizing the "New Jim Code," Benjamin shows how discriminatory designs can encode inequity and also makes a case for race itself as a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice"--