Othering & Belonging Institute's video: Ruha Benjamin on The New Jim Code Race Carceral Technoscience and Liberatory Imagination

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, presents the concept of the “New Jim Code” to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity. Those include explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, ignoring and thereby replicating social divisions, and aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. The talk also considers how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discusses how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends. This presentation takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode 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 manufacture ourselves. For a transcript of this talk visit, https://belonging.berkeley.edu/video-ruha-benjamin