Ruha Benjamin

Ruha Benjamin (born 1978) is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. Trained as a sociologist of science and medicine, she was named a MacArthur “genius” Fellow in 2024 for her work on the social dimensions of technology.

The New Jim Code

Her 2019 book “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code” gave the movement one of its defining terms. The “New Jim Code” describes how automated systems — from predictive policing to hiring algorithms to facial recognition — can extend racial discrimination while appearing neutral, objective, even benevolent. Discriminatory outcomes, she argues, are not glitches but architecture.

Benjamin’s critique cuts against the reflex to “fix it with better data.” The deeper problem, she contends, is building predictive systems inside an unjust society and then trusting them to be fair. In later work — including “Viral Justice” (2022) and “Imagination: A Manifesto” (2024) — she pairs the warning with a call to imagine and design technology otherwise.

She belongs to a cohort of scholars — Timnit Gebru, Joy Buolamwini, Safiya Noble — who reframed the AI debate around bias, power, and accountability rather than distant existential risk. Her opposition is not to computation itself but to the industry’s claim that its systems are objective by default.