Date/Time
Thursday
17 Oct 2019
12:00 am

Location
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall

Event Type
Reception

Ruha Benjamin
Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University

The Haas Insitute for a Fair and Inclusive Society will host a book signing reception with Dr. Ruha Benjamin that will start at 3:00 pm, immediately preceding her talk in Banatao Auditorium at 4:00 pm. Dr. Benjamin’s book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tool for the New Jim Code will be available for sale. Hearty refreshments will be served on a first-come, first-served basis.

About the Book:

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha 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.

Sponsored by Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society ♦ CSTMS ♦ The CITRIS Policy Lab ♦ The Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity working group (AFOG)