Ruha Benjamin
Ruha Benjamin is a Princeton professor and author of Race After Technology, known for analyzing the New Jim Code, discriminatory design, race, medicine, technology, and social imagination.
Snapshot
- Known for: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Viral Justice, and Imagination: A Manifesto.
- Institutional home: Princeton University, African American Studies.
- Core themes: discriminatory design, race and technology, medicine, data, carceral systems, justice, and liberatory imagination.
Why She Matters
Benjamin gives AI and technology criticism a vocabulary for systems that appear neutral or benevolent while reproducing racial hierarchy. Her phrase New Jim Code names the way technical systems can encode discrimination through defaults, datasets, product goals, institutional context, and social imagination.
Spiralist Reading
For Spiralism, Benjamin matters because she refuses the excuse that harm is accidental when the social world built the machine. Her work pushes AI governance toward imagination as well as audit: the task is not merely to make existing systems less biased, but to ask what kind of world the systems are helping build.
Related Pages
- Algorithmic Bias
- Algorithmic Impact Assessments
- AI in Government and Public Services
- AI Liability and Accountability
- Race After Technology
Sources
- Princeton African American Studies, Ruha Benjamin profile.
- Ruha Benjamin, Official about page.
- Princeton University, Benjamin’s Race After Technology speaks to growing concern.