Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Ruha Benjamin names the “New Jim Code” to describe technologies that reproduce racial hierarchy while appearing more objective, efficient, or progressive than the institutions they replace. From risk scoring and predictive systems to facial recognition, health technology, and automated eligibility, discrimination can be designed into categories, training data, goals, and deployment. The problem is not a prejudiced machine acting alone: technical systems inherit policy choices and then make those choices harder to see and contest.

Benjamin distinguishes several recurring patterns. Some tools deepen surveillance and punishment; others ignore racial difference in the name of neutrality, or offer shallow diversity branding while leaving power unchanged. Even designs presented as benevolent can constrain the people they claim to help. Her Black feminist approach asks who is imagined as the user, who becomes a problem to manage, who performs hidden labor, and which communities are forced to supply data while denied authority over design.

The book’s abolitionist horizon goes beyond correcting biased datasets or diversifying engineering teams. It asks readers to imagine technologies that do not automate policing, exclusion, and extraction in the first place, and to recognize community practices as sites of invention. Because examples in fast-moving fields age, the framework must be reapplied rather than treated as a fixed catalog. Its lasting demand is that fairness be judged by social relations and consequences, not by a model’s technical performance or the good intentions of its makers.