Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

The “New Jim Code” is Benjamin’s term for the “employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (5). The term evokes Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow. Alexander argues that the United States prison system presents a racial caste system based on the over-criminalization of certain racial groups. The “New Jim Code” also evokes Jim Crow, the name of a minstrel character based on a Black racist stereotype, as well as the name of segregation laws in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Artificial intelligence are computer systems. They are designed to learn and carry out tasks in ways that imitate human thought and decision-making processes. In Race After Technology, Benjamin challenges the way that AI has been viewed as pure and independent of human bias. Instead, Benjamin argues, AI frequently reproduce the prejudices of its creators and the societies they inhabit.

Benjamin coins this term to describe the combination of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical Race Studies (CRS) that she uses to “examine coded inequity and our contemporary racial landscape” (34).