Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

While the New Jim Code—coded inequity—takes many forms, they all share supposed objectivity, personalization, non-bias, and future orientation. Benjamin encourages resistance to coded inequity. Technology shouldn’t reinstate problems with its supposed fixes. For example, Jay-Z’s Promise app partners with law enforcement in its response to pretrial detention. The app extends the state’s ability to monitor individuals while they are not physically imprisoned.

Virtual reality (VR) technology has been marketed as a tool for empathy, where individuals can experience the challenges that others face. Critics, however, argue that it can fetishize suffering; physically seeing something differently does not erase our engrained perceptions. VR has also been proposed as vocational training for incarcerated people. However, this “solution” overlooks the still small market for formerly incarcerated employees and the automated technologies that filter out such applicants.

Design justice is important, but overvaluing the power of designers means devaluing the labor of workers who enact the design. Benjamin suggests that our solutions need not come in the form of new, trendy design.

In code-switching, marginalized people temporarily change their speech and behavior to suit a norm. We ought to build a more inclusive society where code-switching is not necessary. Benjamin does not condemn technology.