Dr. Ruha Benjamin is the author of “Race After Technology”, and a professor in African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and serves on the executive committee of the Center for Digital Humanities.
In her 2019 book, “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code”, Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. The book examines the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, analyzing specific cases of “discriminatory design” and offering tools for a socially-conscious approach to tech development.
”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 the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library literary prize for Non-fiction. It also received a 2020 Honorable Mention for the Communications, Information technologies, and Media sociology (CITAMS) book award.
Although the book club is an independent initiative, we have had the honor of hosting Dr. Benjamin for conversations twice in the past.
www.RuhaBenjamin.com
