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Books Review: Ruha Benjamin Race After Technology: Abolition Tools for a New Jim Code

Ruha Benjamin is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and her aspiration, she advises readers, is to integrate the analytical approach associated with science and technology studies (STS) and critical race studies in order to enhance her examination of ‘coded inequity and our contemporary racial landscape’ (p. 34). Surprisingly, these ‘two fields of study are often not put into direct conversation’ (p. 41). In this context, the author situates Race After Technology within the field of, what is termed, ‘race critical code studies’ (p. 34) Written prior to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and mostly focusing on the US, a key conceptual hinge for the book is what is termed the ‘New Jim Code’ and so it is important to grasp the historical resonance of the phrase. In brief, the old ‘Jim Crow’ was first introduced as the title of a character in an 1832 minstrel show that mocked and denigrated Black people. Many used ‘Jim Crow’ as a racialized and deeply derogatory ‘epithet’, but the name related to structural and legal processes that were deployed to separate and subordinate Black people. As Benjamin explains that the term was initially associated with a ‘folk concept’, but it taken up as ‘an academic shorthand for legalized racial segregation, oppression, and injustice in the US South between the 1990s and the 1950s’ (p. 9). 986119CSP0010.1177/0261018320986119Critical Social PolicyBook Reviews book-review2020