$35.49
Author: Benjamin Ruha
Brand: Wiley-Interscience
Edition: 1
Number Of Pages: 172
Details: Product Description
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.
Review
Winner of the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Oliver Cromwell Cox Best Book Award 2020
Awarded Honorable Mention in the ASA Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section’s Book Award 2020
Winner of Brooklyn Public Library’s Literary Prize for Nonfiction 2020
“Race After Technology is a brilliant, beautifully argued, engagingly written, and groundbreaking work. Ruha Benjamin is that rare scholar whose sophisticated understanding of science and technology is matched by her deep knowledge of race and racialization. Here she guides us into fresh terrain for understanding and tackling the persistence of racial inequality. This book should be read by everyone committed to creating a more just world.”
―Imani Perry, Princeton University, author of Vexy Thing and Looking for Lorraine
“Race After Technology is essential reading, decoding as it does the ever-expanding and morphing technologies that have infiltrated our everyday lives and our most powerful institutions. These digital tools predictably replicate and deepen racial hierarchies ― all too often strengthening rather than undermining pervasive systems of racial and social control.”
―Michelle Alexander, Union Theological Seminary, author of The New Jim Crow
“This book is the best single overview of how and why new technologies perpetuate and exacerbate racism.”
―Rob Reich, The Wall Street Journal
“This book is worthy of the widest readership, leaving us not only with a deeper understanding of the mutual and shifting roles of race and technology, but also, importantly, with the manageable and doable tools with which to create alternative, equitable, inclusive and prosperous futures.”
―Shakir Mohamed, DeepMind, Nature Machine Intelligence
“Race After Technology is a scintillating examination of how even something as seemingly all-oppressive as surveillance normalization is differentially oppressive ― and how we can build alternative futures and solidary coalitions all the same.”
―Full Stop
“Race After Technology spins [a] web of examples over the reader’s own understanding of technology and leaves the reader with a new lens to view the world around them.”
―Science & Technology Studies
“Powerful yet accessible, […] it is the foundation for an expanded, critical conversation about the meaning of technology in society that desperately calls for greater attention, both academic and activist.”
―Antipode Online
“Benjamin’s work is ideal for anyone who is unafraid to look at the historical intersections of racial injustice, technology, and where these topics inform possible solutions for the future.”
―Library Journal
“[I]mpactfully written, well researched and refreshingly clear […] Simply said, Race After Technology will become a staple in contemporary critical thinking at a time when it is most nee
Release Date: 17-06-2019
Package Dimensions: 21x213x422
