BPL Book Prize Book Club: Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
In honor of the 10-year anniversary of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, we are celebrating all year-long with book clubs featuring past winners. This meeting, we will be discussing 2020 nonfiction winner Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin.
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.
Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the 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 technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.
This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding 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 ourselves manufacture.
2020 BPL Book Prize Winner: Nonfiction
You can place your copy on hold here, and don't forget to check out our Bklyn Book Club Kit featuring discussion questions, research guides and cocktail recipes!
