Bias is infused into the modern currency that drives daily and institutional structures: technology. As we pass off machine learning and AI as objective systems, the developers behind everything from phone apps to complex predictive algorithms carry biases that exist within our society. Ruha Benjamin’s 2019 novel, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tool for the New Jim Code, guides the reader through the detrimental impact of tech implicit bias, or a subconscious bias that is unintentionally embedded, on commonly minority communities. Benjamin is an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University, the embodiment of science, technology, and society studies (STS) here at Stevens. Her novel is a beacon within the emerging field that applies Critical Race Theory to understanding technological applications and even racial technology determinism.
Race After Technology was introduced to me through my Intro to Science Technology and Society class, in which the tech anxieties Benjamin outlined were too relevant to be condensed into a single lecture. Starting with one assigned chapter to cramming in the book in between my other class readings, Benjamin guides the reader beyond personal comfortability within the technology, and AI used on a daily basis to understand how minority groups are being quantified and underrepresented at their expense. Benjamin confronts current technological racial disparity by looking back at the social history of the US as the foundation of America’s economic growth from slavery evolved into Jim Crow laws stretching long after emancipation. After the historical timeline, Benjamin makes her thesis by adding on a new era of systemic racism in which the history of Jim Crow has taken on a new face and the guise of tech objectivity.
The most interesting concept, Benjamin’s core argument, introduces this new lens of implicit racism of a New Jim Code based on computational racism that differentiates from the explicit Jim Crow of the late 19th century to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Defining the difference between historically explicit systems of discrimination from implicit racism, Benjamin connects the lingering effects of racism within legal structures to social perpetuation. With the abolishment of the legal structures of racism, the social structures have been the remnants of Jim Crow. Finally, evaluating rising Big Data within tech and predictive machine learning, Benjamin emphasizes the back-and-forth relationship between society and technology within technological determinism to recognize technology as taking on the new medium of tech bias.
Benjamin’s argument that racism has been encoded into law, behavior, and now technology is not a critique of software developers but the software itself and how it encourages assumption and mindless exclusion based on discriminative social patterns. Benjamin’s objection stems from “The animating force of the New Jim Code is that tech designers encode judgments into technical systems but claim that the racist results of their designs are entirely exterior to the encoding process. Racism thus becomes doubled — magnified and buried under layers of digital denial.”The book is bursting with examples of algorithmic bias in which Benjamin outlines crime prediction used to inform policing to create a tight loop of Black incarceration through biased recidivism risk predictions, the erasure of Black history when a Google Map glitch reads “Malcolm X Boulevard” as “Malcolm Ten Boulevard,” to a predominately Black and Latinx gang database consisting of names belonging to babies under the age of one labeled as “self-described gang members.” The examples seem never-ending, and the book’s only pitfall is the repetition of cases that perfectly exemplify the New Jim Code, taking on the function of a “field guide” to the far reach of tech bias within consumerism, law, and innovation.
