Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“This book explores how such technologies, which often pose as objective, scientific, or progressive, too often reinforce racism and other forms of inequity. Together, we will work to decode the powerful assumptions and values embedded in the material and digital architecture of our world.”

Benjamin outlines the objectives of Race After Technology. This quote also demonstrates her literary use of tech puns to describe society; she uses “decode” as a synonym for understand, and “embedded” to describe how certain values are a part of our society.

“The stakes are high not only because parents’ decisions will follow their children for a lifetime, but also because names reflect much longer histories of conflict and assimilation and signal fierce political struggles—as when US immigrants from Eastern Europe anglicize their names, or African Americans at the height of the Black Power movement took Arabic or African names to oppose White supremacy.”

Benjamin unpacks the cultural and political significance of names. By tying names to the histories that engendered them, Benjamin draws connections between the past and the present—a temporal move she repeats throughout the book.

“A ‘normal’ name is just one of many tools that reinforce racial invisibility.”

This anticipates the theme of visibility and exposure. As Chapter 3 will explore, technologies such as cameras and facial recognition often interact differently with Black individuals, making them hypervisible or invisible. Likewise, names can subject a person to more government surveillance.