Benjamin, Ruha

Impact on the world

A Princeton sociologist whose scholarship bridges science, technology, and racial justice, Benjamin's Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) became one of the most widely cited critiques of algorithmic bias in the AI era, coining “the New Jim Code” to describe how discriminatory design can be baked into supposedly neutral technology — whether by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, replicating existing divisions while ignoring them, or attempting to fix bias and inadvertently worsening it. The book won the 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award and the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction; she founded the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton to train researchers in reimagining data for justice, and in 2024 was named a MacArthur Fellow for her body of work, which also includes Viral Justice (2022) and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024).

Life & background

Born in 1978 in Wai, Maharashtra, India, to an African American father and a mother of Indian and Persian descent, Benjamin spent parts of her childhood in South Central Los Angeles, South Carolina, the Marshall Islands, and Eswatini (Swaziland), completing her International Baccalaureate at the Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa. She earned a BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, then an MA and PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard's Science, Technology, and Society Program. She joined Princeton's Department of African American Studies, where she now holds the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professorship, received the university's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2017, and delivered Spelman College's 2024 Founders Day address after being named a MacArthur Fellow that year.

Sources

1. Princeton Department of African American Studies; Columbia School of Social Work