29 pages • 58 minutes read
Ruha BenjaminRace After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Retooling Solidarity, Reimagining Justice”
While the New Jim Code—coded inequity—takes many forms, they all share supposed objectivity, personalization, non-bias, and future orientation. Benjamin encourages resistance to coded inequity. Technology shouldn’t reinstate problems with its supposed fixes. For example, Jay-Z’s Promise app partners with law enforcement in its response to pretrial detention. The app extends the state’s ability to monitor individuals while they are not physically imprisoned.
Virtual reality (VR) technology has been marketed as a tool for empathy, where individuals can experience the challenges that others face. Critics, however, argue that it can fetishize suffering; physically seeing something differently does not erase our engrained perceptions. VR has also been proposed as vocational training for incarcerated people. However, this “solution” overlooks the still small market for formerly incarcerated employees and the automated technologies that filter out such applicants.
Design justice is important, but overvaluing the power of designers means devaluing the labor of workers who enact the design. Benjamin suggests that our solutions need not come in the form of new, trendy design.
In code-switching, marginalized people temporarily change their speech and behavior to suit a norm. We ought to build a more inclusive society where code-switching is not necessary. Benjamin does not condemn technology. Instead, she insists that we slow down rapid technological advancement and hold designers accountable to equity-conscious approaches.
Activists have implemented various tools to hold others accountable, including “coded equity audits” that check AI systems against criteria of equity (185). New Jim Code abolition requires that data be democratized. Benjamin imagines an “equity” label on data and machine learning programs, like the “organic” labels that appear on food (190). There is a long history of data disenfranchisement for the African American community. Organizations like the Data for Black Lives movement join in the tradition of fighting for data justice.
Benjamin calls us not to be distracted by new technologies promising to solve problems. Rather, we must experiment with and explore methods for justice. We must seek alternatives to default settings, like Afrofuturist and Chicanofuturist visions of freer possibilities, or Critical Race Studies scholars encouraging us to imagine the futures we want to create. To challenge the New Jim Code, Benjamin calls for using creativity and innovation, and for liberatory engagements with technology.
Chapter 5 Analysis
Race After Technology meditates on what abolition strategies of the New Jim Code can look like. Benjamin looks to other activist movements, such as prison abolition and the Movement for Black Lives, to propose methods for challenging code inequity. While her book criticizes technology and the rhetoric around it for perpetuating social inequalities, Benjamin does not dismiss tech’s positive potential. She calls for it to be used responsibly, for designers to be held accountable, and for us to recognize how technology does not transcend human prejudice.
In her efforts to describe an abolitionist “toolkit,” Benjamin is careful not to divulge too much. She writes, “not all manner of gettin’ free should be exposed. Recall that Frederick Douglass, the philosopher of fugitivity, reprimanded those who revealed the routes that fugitives took to escape slavery, declaring that these supposed allies turned the underground railroad into the upperground railroad’” (161). Benjamin, alongside others like the publishers of the Digital Defense Playbook, must walk a line. They must strike a balance between educating the public about the dangers of racism and technology, and protecting this information from state forces that can use it to optimize surveillance. As with her more casual tone and accessible language, Benjamin demonstrates an awareness of her audience.
Chapter 5 also explores the marketing of virtual reality programs as tools for empathy. Companies hope that seeing someone else’s struggle will produce empathy, but Benjamin argues that VR can serve as “poverty porn,” where a desirous gaze meets human suffering. Further, our perspectives are not solely informed by what we see, making VR viewing a flawed experiment. Benjamin’s criticism of VR points toward the idea that there is violence in needing to be in someone else’s shoes to value their experience.
Rather than being an act of empathy, this VR program reinforces self-centeredness. We are not made to identify with how another feels, but rather to experience how we might feel in a similar situation. Further, the virtual reality format entails erasing the other person and replacing them with yourself. Erasing an individual who is already subject to oppression reflects Benjamin’s argument: many of our proposed solutions to inequality introduce inequalities of their own.
