When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer. The awardees receive $800,000 over a five-year period. The Post will publish their innovations over the next several weeks, starting with Ruha Benjamin, who received her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley.

Ruha Benjamin

The daughter of an African American man and a Persian-Indian woman, Ruha Benjamin is a transdisciplinary scholar and writer illuminating how advances in science, medicine, and technology reflect and reproduce social inequality. By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices.

Benjamin shares the inspiration behind her work on her website: “I write, teach, and speak widely about the relationship between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice.”

“…I arrived here by way of a winding road that has snaked through South Central Los Angeles; Conway, South Carolina; Majuro, South Pacific, and Swaziland, Southern Africa. I come from many Souths, and I tend to bring this perspective, of looking at the world from its underbelly, to my analysis.”

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Benjamin’s academic and professional impact is far-reaching. Benjamin served as an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University before joining the faculty at Princeton in 2014. She has since received numerous honors, including the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. She is also the founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab, a space where students, artists, and activists work together to challenge tech-mediated harms.

In People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Benjamin examines the persistent gap between those who contribute to new medical technologies and those who actually benefit from them. She uses the California Stem Cell Initiative as a case study to illustrate a persistent problem in medical research: socially marginalized groups engaged for research purposes but not guaranteed access to the treatments that result from that research. Benjamin further investigates the intersection of science and society in Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019). In this work, she exposes the racial hierarchies and systems of social control embedded in seemingly neutral algorithms and automated systems that people interact with daily. These technologies, which rely on biased training data and flawed assumptions, cause direct harm to individuals and communities. Benjamin provides numerous examples of digital systems that perpetuate what she calls the “New Jim Code,” such as marketing algorithms that promote real estate based on “ethnic preferences,” thereby maintaining segregated neighborhoods, and crime prediction software that justifies intrusive surveillance of communities of color.

In her two most recent books, Benjamin weaves together personal experience and social analysis. Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022) is a poignant meditation on how individuals drive meaningful social change. She advocates for the power of grassroots initiatives that prioritize care over control, such as doulas focused on birth equity and tenant organizers fighting the legacy of redlining. In Imagination: A Manifesto (2024), Benjamin argues that we are constrained by policies and paradigms that result from the narrow imagination of those who monopolize power and resources and seek to benefit the few at the expense of the many. As founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, she works with students, organizers, and artists to identify, challenge, and transform tech-mediated harms. Benjamin deepens our understanding of the dangers that technological advancements pose to vulnerable populations while reimagining what counts as innovation and who gets to shape our collective future.

Ruha Benjamin received a BA from Spelman College (2001) and an MA (2004) and PhD (2008) from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab (since 2020).

The MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award and the Spelman College web sites are the sources of this report.

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