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.
Themes
Surveillance and Visibility: The Challenges of Being Seen
Race After Technology explores the challenges of being seen that Black people face in contemporary American society. The politics of visuality involves both an experience of being overlooked and of being excessively looked at. This ignorance and targeting couple in ways that infringe on the inclusion, privacy, and safety of Black people.
A history of white supremacy has led to the development of technology that leaves Black individuals unseen. Benjamin offers the example of a webcam user remarking: “I think my Blackness is interfering with the computer’s ability to follow me” (97). Likewise, the TV sitcom Better Off Ted explores the issue of a “new state of the art system” installed at a workplace (97). The system was comprised of automated devices, all of which did not work for Black employees because the technology could not recognize darker skin. Such technologies, Benjamin explains, are too often created by white designers with white users in mind. They exclude populations that have already been historically excluded from other public activities. It is in cases like these where excluded communities push to be seen.
However, technology does not always render these communities invisible. In the realm of surveillance, Black bodies are made hypervisible. For example, Polaroid has faced criticism for its partnership with apartheid South Africa when it provided a flash “boost button” to enhance photos for passbooks. These passbooks were used to track and restrict Black South Africans’ movement (106). Likewise, facial recognition technology is often not well-designed to distinguish between Black people’s faces and has led to the profiling and wrongful accusation of many people. In instances like these, design has led to the alarming overexposure of Black people to harm and misinterpretation.
This demonstrates the issue of being seen both not enough and far too much. Benjamin reconciles this seeming contradiction by explaining that when Black people are seen, it is often not for who they genuinely are but who they are presumed to be. Hyper- and under-visibility associate negative stereotypes with the external appearance of being Black and put Black people at risk of being misunderstood and over-criminalized. Race After Technology asks that people be given more control over how, when, and where they are seen. The grassroots organization Stop LAPD Spying monitors the way the Los Angeles Police Department monitors LA residents. Likewise, Benjamin invites us to think critically about the ways the government and society are seeing us.
Naming and Defining
Benjamin opens Race After Technology with a meditation on baby naming. She expresses frustration with how her son, who has an Arabic name, will be targeted by law enforcement. Benjamin discusses a class activity where she and her students consider what their names mean, in terms of heritage, but what they also mean for how society defines them. She explains that white names are seen as neutral, while African American names are mocked as unique or “made up,” reflecting anti-Black sentiments in society.
Benjamin illustrates how what we name something has social and even legal consequences. She enacts it in the writing of her text. First, her main term—“the New Jim Code”—carries significance in its name. It evokes Jim Crow segregation laws, as well as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which, like Race After Technology, identifies old racial stratifications in modern-day systems. Benjamin’s use of the word “new” in conjunction with the 19th-century minstrel figure of Jim Crow reflects her intentional coupling of the old and new in the “New Jim Code.” With this term, Benjamin insists on the link between the ancient issue of racism and the brand-new, advanced technologies of today.
Benjamin continues to play with words and their meanings. She begins chapters 2-4 with definitions of “glitch,” “exposure,” and “fix,” respectively. For each of these words she offers a list of definitions that add nuance to a singular understanding of the word. In “fix,” for instance, the offered definitions help the reader to conclude that a fix can be both good and bad. For “glitch,” a seemingly small thing—like a racist slip of the tongue—has enormous implications. Finally, for “exposure,” we see that it is not simply benign visibility but may also indicate an infringement on a person’s privacy and protection.
By bringing our attention to the importance of what we call things, Benjamin makes a commentary on language. She challenges the rhetoric of tech-forward Silicon Valley companies that euphemize and idealize, using language of solution and public good. She encourages her readers to see that behind those promises to the public are private interests and ignorance about the inequities that are produced.
Abolition: Then and Now
Abolition is a central concept in Race After Technology. Generally, abolition refers to the eradication of a system or institution. Benjamin writes her book as a kind of guide toward building an “abolitionist toolkit,” specifically for tackling the New Jim Code. Abolition in her usage means deconstructing the perpetuation of racial inequities through technology.
By using the word “abolition,” Benjamin evokes the most popular usage of the word in our culture—the 19th century abolition of slavery in the United States. In doing so, she creates historical continuity between slavery and modern-day practices of racial discrimination. Benjamin implies that such racist practices did not stop, or even pause to appear anew, but have simply continued in new forms.
In using the word “abolition,” Benjamin also evokes other contemporary movements of similar political leanings. For instance, she not only conjures the prison abolition movement but even quotes its important leaders, such as prison abolitionist and educator Mariame Kaba. Likewise, “abolition” evokes contemporary calls for the abolition of police institutions that have intensified in the wake of increasingly public incidents of Black death from police brutality, such as the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Benjamin writes in the spirit of abolitionist practices. In describing how we might resist the New Jim Code, Benjamin is careful not to share every detail. She wants to protect information from being accessed by the very powers imposing inequalities. Benjamin draws on African American 19th-century history to inform her practices in the 21st century. This choice not to expose—a key word in the book as well—is especially important in the age of technology that is so deft at divulging information.
In keeping with her practice of redefining how we understand words, Benjamin invites readers to rethink the meaning of abolition itself. She insists that it is more than destruction: “Calls for abolition are never simply about bringing harmful systems to an end but also about envisioning new ones. After all, the etymology of ‘abolition’ includes Latin root words for ‘destroy’ (abolere) and ‘grow’ (olere)” (162). Race After Technology is part of that process of both destroying harmful systems and building an equitable society.
