Sociologist and author
Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a 2024 MacArthur Fellow whose work examines the relationship between race, justice, and technology. Her book Race After Technology introduces the concept of the "New Jim Code" to reveal how seemingly neutral algorithms and technologies can reinforce racial inequality.
by Ruha Benjamin
Sociologist Ruha Benjamin coins the term the New Jim Code to describe how emerging technologies encode racial hierarchies under the guise of innovation, from biased facial recognition to discriminatory hiring algorithms to predictive policing tools that target Black communities. She draws on case studies, historical analysis, and speculative design to argue for abolitionist approaches to technology that dismantle rather than reform discriminatory systems.
The books Ruha Benjamin references, cites, and recommends most frequently.
by Michelle Alexander
Alexander argues that mass incarceration has functioned as a racial caste system analogous to Jim Crow, using the War on Drugs to legally strip Black Americans of voting rights, employment, housing, and civic standing. She contends that color-blind rhetoric masks the racialized design and outcomes of modern criminal justice.
by Ibram X. Kendi
Kendi argues that there is no neutral position on race: every policy, idea, and person is either racist or antiracist based on whether it produces or reduces racial inequity. He rejects the category of 'not racist' and narrates his own evolution away from internalized racist ideas through chapters on biology, class, gender, and culture.
by Shoshana Zuboff
Zuboff reveals how tech companies extract and sell predictions of human behaviour for profit. Surveillance capitalism is a new economic logic that threatens autonomy and democracy.
by Don Norman
Norman reveals why badly designed objects frustrate us and how good design makes correct use intuitive. The principles, affordances, feedback, constraints, apply far beyond physical products.
Who Ruha draws from, and who draws from Ruha — aggregated across every book in this collection. Counts show the number of citation links, not the depth of each one.