Graph · Publication
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
01 · In focus
One publication, in the field.
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publication
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03 · Background
From the source record.
Body prose as it appears in movement-graph’s published markdown for this entity. Links to other corpus entities resolve to their graph page; links to deeper repo paths are kept as text so the page does not invent a route.
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code is a 2019 book by the sociologist of science and technology Ruha Benjamin, published by Polity (paperback ISBN 9781509526406, hardcover ISBN 9781509526390). It is the published artefact most often credited with bringing the New Jim Code — Benjamin's framework for examining how seemingly "neutral" algorithms can replicate or worsen racial bias, drawn explicitly from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow as the named lineage — into general circulation in the algorithmic-accountability literature, and it is the publication-side anchor on which the Black-feminist abolitionist register of the race-and-technology field most often rests. The book won the American Sociological Association's 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Prize, the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Award for Nonfiction, and an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Book Award, the named cluster of mainstream-recognition events that anchor it as the book most often cited as foundation for the post-2019 cohort of race-and-technology scholarship.
The book's central move is to refuse the framing of technology as neutral, arguing instead that social hierarchies — and racism in particular — are embedded in the logical layer of internet-based technologies. Benjamin's named term the New Jim Code condenses the argument into a single short-form: that the racial-caste system Michelle Alexander analysed under the name the New Jim Crow — the post-civil-rights regime of racialised mass incarceration — has a contemporary analogue in the racial encoding of automated decision-making, search-and-classification systems, hiring and screening algorithms, biometric and surveillance infrastructures, and the broader infrastructure layer of digital life. The book's reviewer-side reception has carried the same formulation. Michelle Alexander herself, in the named cover blurb the publisher continues to feature, frames Benjamin's work as showing that "these digital tools predictably replicate and deepen racial hierarchies — all too often strengthening rather than undermining systems of racial and social control"; and Stephen Kearse, in The Nation's review, frames Benjamin's analyses as a reminder that "as much as we try to purge ourselves from our tools and view them as external to our flaws, they are always extensions of us". The subtitle's third term — abolitionist tools — names the book's positive register: alongside the critique, Benjamin sets out the case for treating data, design, and infrastructure as terrain on which abolitionist organising can build, the same horizon the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab has continued to operationalise since.
The book's argument is grounded in Benjamin's named professional trajectory. She holds the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies chair at Princeton University and is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, earned her MA and PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, and was previously Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Boston University (2010-2014), held a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics, and a faculty fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society Program — the trajectory across science-and-technology studies, Black studies, and sociology of medicine out of which the book's interdisciplinary register develops. Her named first book People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2013) and her co-edited Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press, 2019) frame the prior work Race After Technology condenses into a single-author monograph for general readers, and her subsequent Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Imagination: A Manifesto (Norton, 2024) extend the same abolitionist-imagination register into pandemic and reconstruction-of-the-possible registers. The Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab's stated mission "to bring together students, educators, activists, and artists to develop a critical and creative approach to data conception, production, and circulation" and its named project register — Algorithmic Accountability, Clearview AI, Digital Border Wall Project, Digital IDs & Smart Cities, Policing & Surveillance, Prisons, Housing & Neighborhoods, Education, Hospitals & Healthcare, Mutual Aid, Work — and named programmes (Tech Freedom School, Critical + Creative Career Fair) are the most direct concrete-services translation of the book's abolitionist tools register into a continuing organising-and-research practice. Benjamin was named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow with the citation "Illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces inequality and championing the role of imagination in social transformation", the named mainstream-recognition event most often paired with the book in subsequent citation.
Within the corpus, Race After Technology sits as the abolitionist Black-feminist entry of the algorithmic-accountability foundational-artefact register, joining the corpus's other publication-side anchors — Weapons of Math Destruction (2016), the public-policy popular-book anchor on Cathy O'Neil's side; Algorithms of Oppression (2018), the Black-feminist search-engine anchor on Safiya Umoja Noble's side; Automating Inequality (2018), the US welfare-state automated-decision-making anchor on Virginia Eubanks's side; Atlas of AI (2021), the extractive / material AI critique on Kate Crawford's side; Design Justice (2020), the participatory-design framework-text monograph on Sasha Costanza-Chock's side; Unmasking AI (2023), the memoir-and-manifesto book of the Algorithmic Justice League; and the peer-reviewed-paper anchors Gender Shades (2018) and Stochastic Parrots (2021) — as the publication-side artefacts on which the make-AI-good movement's grassroots organising routinely rests. Of that set, Race After Technology is the named single book that brought the abolitionist register and the explicit Black-radical lineage — Michelle Alexander on the carceral side, the Lab's namesake Ida B. Wells on the documentary-and-organising side — into the algorithmic-accountability literature, and it is the work most often co-cited with Algorithms of Oppression as the named pair of late-2010s monographs that established race-and-technology as a coherent scholarly-and-organising field. The book is the conceptual grounding on which the Distributed AI Research Institute and the Algorithmic Justice League build their continuing research-and-advocacy programmes from inside the Black-tech-scholarship register, and the publication-side foundation underwriting the Black-feminist / transfeminist apparatus on which Joana Varon and Paz Peña build their corpus-recorded Decolonising AI: A transfeminist approach to data and social justice chapter — the named single-paragraph short-form of the same argument that Race After Technology sets out at book length.
04 · Sources
Where this came from.
6 sources listed from the pinned corpus. Links are shown only when the source URL is a valid HTTP(S) address.
- 6 source links shown
- 13 body links rewritten to graph pages
- 0 omitted links on this page
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en.wikipedia.org
Checked 2026-05-19Wikipedia entry on Race After Technology — primary secondary source for the full title and subtitle (Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code), the Polity 2019 publication, the hardcover ISBN 9781509526390, the book's central argument that "social hierarchies, particularly racism, are embedded in the logical layer of internet-based technologies", the named concept the book brings into circulation (the New Jim Code, drawn explicitly from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow as the analytic framework for examining how seemingly "neutral" algorithms can replicate or worsen racial bias), and the named recognitions: the American Sociological Association's 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Prize, the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Award for Nonfiction, and an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Book Award
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en.wikipedia.org
Checked 2026-05-19Wikipedia entry on Ruha Benjamin — primary secondary source for Benjamin's 2008 MA / PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, her prior Assistant Professorship in African American Studies and Sociology at Boston University (2010-2014), her postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics (2010), her named faculty fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society Program, her Princeton position in the Department of African American Studies, her named books in order (People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, 2013; Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, 2019, edited; Race After Technology, 2019; Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, 2022; Imagination: A Manifesto, 2024), the 2017 Princeton President's Award for Distinguished Teaching, and Benjamin's named membership of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board" (2020)
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macfound.org
Checked 2026-05-19MacArthur Foundation official 2024 Fellow page for Ruha Benjamin — primary source for the Foundation's named short citation "Illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces inequality and championing the role of imagination in social transformation", Benjamin's named Princeton title (Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies), her founding-director role at the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and the Foundation's named framing of Race After Technology as the book that "exposes racial bias in algorithms and automated systems"
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thejustdatalab.com
Checked 2026-05-19Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab homepage — primary source for the Lab's self-described mission to "bring together students, educators, activists, and artists to develop a critical and creative approach to data conception, production, and circulation" and to "rethink and retool data for justice", and for the Lab's named project register (Algorithmic Accountability; Clearview AI; Digital Border Wall Project; Digital IDs & Smart Cities; Policing & Surveillance; Prisons; Housing & Neighborhoods; Education; Hospitals & Healthcare; Mutual Aid; Work; Art & Alternative Futures) and named programmes (Tech Freedom School, Critical + Creative Career Fair) that operationalise the book's argument into a continuing organising-and-research practice
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ruhabenjamin.com
Checked 2026-05-19Author's official book page (ruhabenjamin.com) for Race After Technology — primary source for the paperback ISBN 9781509526406 (cross-checked against Amazon listing), Michelle Alexander's named cover blurb that "these digital tools predictably replicate and deepen racial hierarchies — all too often strengthening rather than undermining systems of racial and social control", and Stephen Kearse's named review formulation (in The Nation) that Benjamin's analyses "remind us that as much as we try to purge ourselves from our tools and view them as external to our flaws, they are always extensions of us"
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ruhabenjamin.com
Checked 2026-05-19Author's official biographical page (ruhabenjamin.com/about) — primary source for Benjamin's named full title (Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University), her founding-director role at the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, her named book list with publishers (People's Science, Stanford University Press 2013; Captivating Technology, Duke University Press 2019 edited; Race After Technology, Polity 2019; Viral Justice, Princeton University Press 2022; Imagination: A Manifesto, Norton 2024), her 2008 Berkeley MA / PhD in Sociology, and the named self-framing quotation "The tension between innovation and equity is mainly what keeps me up at night" that situates the book in her continuing programme
Source: entities/publications/pub-race-after-technology.md in movement-graph at pin 3cc1a36.