11/25/2025
We are so thankful for Ruja Benjamin who helped get our racism and health training launched.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1JVxxR71ay/?mibextid=wwXIfwr r ourd
She asks one question that could define our century: who builds the future, and who gets left out of it?
Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. But her work reaches far beyond any single campus or discipline.
She studies how science, medicine, and technology promise progress—but often replicate old inequalities in new digital forms.
And she's shown the world something most people never considered: racism doesn't just live in people. It can live in code, in software, in systems that quietly shape who gets seen, who gets hired, who gets help.
This isn't science fiction. This is happening now.
Born in 1978 to an African-American father and a mother of Indian and Persian descent, Ruha grew up between worlds—South Central Los Angeles, Conway, South Carolina, the South Pacific, Southern Africa.
That movement between cultures taught her something essential: systems that seem neutral often aren't. The story you're told about how things work depends entirely on where you're standing.
She earned her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, then her MA and PhD from UC Berkeley. Postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA and Harvard followed.
But Ruha didn't become famous for her credentials.
She became essential for what she revealed about the world we're building.
In 2019, she published "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code." The book cut through tech-industry hype to show how emerging technologies can reinforce white supremacy and deepen social inequity—even when they're designed with good intentions.
The concept of the "New Jim Code"—adapting Michelle Alexander's work "The New Jim Crow"—reframed the global conversation on technology and power.
Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation through explicit legal codes in the American South for nearly a century. They were visible, brutal, and eventually defeated through activism and legislation.
The New Jim Code is different.
It operates through algorithms that seem neutral. Through automated systems that claim to be objective. Through "smart" technologies that promise efficiency but encode old prejudices into new digital infrastructure.
A gang database in which 87% of names are Black and Latino—including babies under age one supposedly listed as "self-described gang members."
A beauty contest judged by robots where all winners were white.
Facial recognition software that can't recognize darker skin tones.
Hiring algorithms that screen out qualified candidates based on zip codes that correlate with race.
Predictive policing systems that send more officers to neighborhoods already over-policed, creating a feedback loop that "proves" those neighborhoods need more policing.
These aren't accidents. They're the result of human choices embedded in code.
Ruha showed that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming in the dark, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral—even benevolent—compared to the racism of previous eras.
Her argument is simple but devastating: when you build systems using data from an unequal society, those systems will replicate and amplify that inequality unless you actively intervene.
"Race After Technology" won the 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award for antiracist scholarship and the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction.
But more importantly, it reached people.
The book found its way into the hands of business executives, medical professionals, high school students, tech workers, nurses, engineers, women's advocates—audiences far beyond academia.
Ruha was surprised by the breadth of response. "The variety of disciplines and practitioners that resonate with the problem of discriminatory design—many more than I thought," she said. "Everything from nursing, business, professional schools, to different STEM programs to humanities."
She didn't stop at critique.
Ruha founded the Ida B. Wells JUST DATA Lab at Princeton—a collaborative space where artists, engineers, activists, and students design technologies guided by care instead of control.
The lab exposes injustices hidden in statistics. It tracks how pre-existing social conditions like poverty, racism, and colonialism determine outcomes—whether in COVID-19 deaths, criminal justice, or housing access.
During the pandemic, her team created a "Pandemic Portal" that synthesized data on the racial dimensions of COVID-19, situating statistics within historical and sociological frameworks so people could see not just numbers, but patterns of structural inequality.
Her approach blends ethics with imagination. She asks us to build a digital world that protects dignity as fiercely as it pursues innovation.
In 2017, she received Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. Students describe her classes as transformative—not just learning about problems, but designing solutions.
She has students complete hands-on projects designing technology that doesn't reinforce the status quo or inequalities. They learn to ask: Who benefits from this system? Who might it harm? What values are encoded in this design?
When she teaches, she doesn't warn of a dark future. She maps a brighter one.
One where inclusion is not an afterthought. Where technology amplifies justice rather than prejudice. Where the people most affected by systems have a voice in building them.
She's written four books total, including "Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want" (2022) and "Imagination: A Manifesto" (2024).
She's received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Institute for Advanced Study.
In 2020, she received the Marguerite Casey Foundation Inaugural Freedom Scholar Award.
And in 2024, her work earned the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship—recognizing what her students already knew: she is one of the defining thinkers of our time.
The MacArthur Fellowship doesn't just honor past achievement. It bets on future impact.
And Ruha is using that platform to reach even wider audiences.
She speaks to tech workers organizing against corporate collusion with state-sanctioned racism. She collaborates with artists who can raise awareness in ways statistics cannot. She meets with high school students in South Central Los Angeles via videoconference to discuss how technological bias impacts their daily lives.
"I see this as an extension of my teaching outside the classroom, engaging with people, audiences, communities," she said. "It's been really rewarding."
One review in The Nation captured what makes her work essential: "What's ultimately distinctive about Race After Technology is that its withering critiques of the present are so galvanizing...Each time she pries open a black box, linking the present to some horrific past, the future feels more open-ended, more mutable."
Ruha Benjamin's message is simple but radical:
Technology is not destiny.
Every system we create is a reflection of our values. And we can choose to design for equality.
The algorithms that decide who gets a job interview, who qualifies for a loan, who receives medical care, who gets flagged by police—these aren't inevitable. They're choices.
And if biased humans built biased systems, then liberated humans can build liberating ones.
Ruha proves that criticism without imagination is paralysis. But imagination without action is fantasy.
She offers both the critique and the toolkit. The analysis and the vision. The warning and the way forward.
In an age when artificial intelligence is reshaping every aspect of society—from education to employment to criminal justice—Ruha Benjamin reminds us that there's nothing artificial about the choices we make.
The future isn't something that happens to us.
It's something we build, line by line, algorithm by algorithm, choice by choice.
And the question isn't whether technology will shape our world.
It's whether we'll shape technology to reflect our highest values or our deepest prejudices.
Ruha Benjamin is showing us how to choose wisely.
