Ruha Benjamin > Quotes

“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”
― Ruha Benjamin

“Invisibility, with regard to Whiteness, offers immunity. To be unmarked by race allows you to reap the benefits but escape responsibility for your role in an unjust system.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“the New Jim Code”: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.8”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“After all, why is it that we can so readily imagine growing heart cells in a lab, but not growing empathy for other human beings in our everyday lives? For many, the idea that we can defy politics as usual and channel human ingenuity towards more egalitarian forms of social organization is far-fetched. Our collective imaginations tend to shrink when confronted with entrenched inequality and injustice when what we need is just as much investment and innovation in our social reality as we pour into transforming our material lives.”
― Ruha Benjamin

“In a classic study of how names impact people’s experience on the job market, researchers show that, all other things being equal, job seekers with White-sounding first names received 50 percent more callbacks from employers than job seekers with Black-sounding names.5 They calculated that the racial gap was equivalent to eight years of relevant work experience, which White applicants did not actually have; and the gap persisted across occupations, industry, employer size – even when employers included the “equal opportunity” clause in their ads.6 With emerging technologies we might assume that racial bias will be more scientifically rooted out. Yet, rather than challenging or overcoming the cycles of inequity, technical fixes too often reinforce and even deepen the status quo. For example, a study by a team of computer scientists at Princeton examined whether a popular algorithm, trained on human writing online, would exhibit the same biased tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. They found that the algorithm associated White-sounding names with “pleasant” words and Black-sounding names with “unpleasant” ones.7 Such findings demonstrate what I call “the New Jim Code”: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“Better never means better for everyone … It always means worse, for some.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“As Kamal Sinclair – emerging media researcher and artist – posits: Story and narrative are the code for humanity’s operating system. We have used stories to communicate knowledge, prescribe behavior, and imagine our futures since our earliest days. Story and narrative inform how we design everything from technology to social systems. They shape the norms in which we perform our identities, even perhaps the mutations of our DNA and perceptions of reality. Stories are the first step in the process of how we imagine our reality; they literally make our reality.84”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“As Margaret Atwood writes, “Better never means better for everyone … It always means worse, for some.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“If blind people admit to seeing race, why do sighted people pretend not see it?”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“That new tools are coded in old biases is surprising only if we equate technological innovation with social progress.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“Zeros and ones, if we are not careful, could deepen the divides between haves and have-nots, between the deserving and the undeserving – rusty value judgments embedded in shiny new systems.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“Ultimately the danger of the New Jim Code positioning is that existing social biases are reinforced – yes. But new methods of social control are produced as well. Does this mean that every form of technological prediction or personalization has racist effects? Not necessarily. It means that, whenever we hear the promises of tech being extolled, our antennae should pop up to question what all that hype of “better, faster, fairer” might be hiding and making us ignore. And, when bias and inequity come to light, “lack of intention” to harm is not a viable alibi. One cannot reap the reward when things go right but downplay responsibility when they go wrong.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“Because those who monopolize resources monopolize imagination.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto

“by focusing mainly on individuals’ identities and overlooking the norms and structures of the tech industry, many diversity initiatives offer little more than cosmetic change, demographic percentages on a company pie chart, concealing rather than undoing the racist status quo.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“Far from coming upon a sinister story of racist programmers scheming in the dark corners of the web, we will find that the desire for objectivity, efficiency, profitability, and progress fuels the pursuit of technical fixes across many different social arenas. Oh, if only there were a way to slay centuries of racial demons with a social justice bot! But, as we will see, the road to inequity is paved with technical fixes.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“Is the Bullet Blocker NIJ IIIA Sprout Backpack a “failure of imagination,” or simply the natural extension of a eugenic imagination that displaces deadly social problems onto individuals, asking the most vulnerable to literally shoulder the problem?”
― Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto

“We ride rather than drive the innovation wave. Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“Move slower and empower people.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“A world that relies on social inequality to keep its machinery running can only afford for a handful of people to imagine themselves “gifted.” Gifted = destined leaders and bosses, visionaries and innovators who have the time and resources to design the future while the masses are trained to sit still, raise their hands, and take instruction.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto

“Telegram@velocemarco Buy Cocaine online in Bradford”
― Ruha Benjamin, Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom

“Pri. Master Disk, Pri. Slave Disk, Sec. Master, Sec. Slave.” Programmed here is a virtual hierarchy organizing my computer’s software operations … I often wondered why the programmers chose such signifiers that hark back to our nation’s ignominious past … And even though I resisted the presumption of a racial affront or intentionality in such a peculiar deployment of the slave and master coupling, its choice as a signifier of the computer’s operations nonetheless struck me.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“But, as Critical Resistance has argued, simply diverting resources in this way is no panacea, because schools and public housing as they currently function are an extension of the PIC: many operate with a logic of carcerality and on policies that discriminate against those who have been convicted of crimes. Pouring money into them as they are will only make them more effective in their current function as institutions of social control.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“In fact the author of The Art of Computer Programming, the field’s bible (and some call Knuth himself “the Yoda of Silicon Valley”), recently commented that he feels “algorithms are getting too prominent in the world. It started out that computer scientists were worried nobody was listening to us. Now I’m worried that too many people are listening.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“The selective outrage follows longstanding patterns of neglect and normalizes anti-Blackness as the weather, as
Christina Sharpe notes, whereas non-Black suffering is treated as a disaster.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“Justice, in this sense, is not a static value but an ongoing methodology that can and should be incorporated into tech design.82 For this reason, too, it is vital that people engaged in tech development partner with those who do important sociocultural work honing narrative tools through the arts, humanities, and social justice organizing.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“A “normal” name is just one of many tools that reinforce racial invisibility.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“the law is never enough to uphold (or overthrow) unjust systems.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto

“Move Fast, Break People, and Call It Progress”?”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“Graphic designer Natasha Jen puts it bluntly in her talk “Design Thinking is Bullsh*t,” urging design practitioners to avoid the jargon and buzzwords associated with their field, to engage in more self-criticism, to base their ideas on evidence, and to stop assuming that their five-step process is needed for any and every thing.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“How else could she survive, could any of us survive, without the ability to envision a world, even if only with the companions we are able to conjure out of the earth, where we are free simply to be?”
― Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto