Ruha Benjamin Discusses Race After Technology: BPL Book Prize at 10
In honor of the 10th year anniversary of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, we've invited Ruha Benjamin back to the Dweck stage to discuss her 2020 prize-winning book Race After Technology and its pressing resonances with the recent explosion of artificial intelligence. Joining her in conversation is Brian Jones, author of the forthcoming Black History Is for Everyone (Haymarket Books, September 2025) and Director of the Center for Educators and Schools at New York Public Library.
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, 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.
PARTICPANTS
Ruha Benjamin is Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024). Ruha is the recipient fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and most recently the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. For more info, visit www.ruhabenjamin.com
Brian Jones is director of the Center for Educators and Schools at The New York Public Library. Brian taught elementary grades in NYC’s public schools for nine years before earning a PhD in Urban Education from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He served as associate director of education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where he was also a scholar in residence. Brian is the author of The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History (NYU Press, 2022) and Black History Is for Everyone (Haymarket Books, September 2025).
