Race After Technology

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code is a 2019 book by Princeton sociologist Ruha Benjamin that names and analyzes the contemporary reproduction of racial hierarchy through technical systems. The book is not a catalogue of racist algorithms; it is a structural analysis of how the design of technology encodes racial governance without naming it. Benjamin's central argument is that the "New Jim Code" is not a malfunction but a design feature — the use of proxies, data, and the language of neutrality to reproduce racial stratification in domains from predictive policing to healthcare to social media.

The book intervenes in algorithmic fairness discourse by shifting the question from "how do we make algorithms fairer?" to "why do we build systems that sort and classify populations in the first place?" This reframing connects Benjamin's work to the broader critique of WMDs and to Safiya Noble's analysis of the racial politics of search. Where reformist approaches seek to patch bias, Benjamin's abolitionist approach asks whether the systems themselves are compatible with justice.