Within the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the word “viral” has a latest resonance, and it’s not necessarily positive. Ruha Benjamin, a scholar who investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology, advocates a shift in perspective. She thinks justice can be contagious. That’s the premise of Benjamin’s award-winning book “Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want,” as she shared with MIT Libraries staff on a June 14 visit.
“If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that something almost undetectable could be deadly, and that we are able to transmit it without even knowing,” said Benjamin, professor of African American studies at Princeton University. “Doesn’t this imply that small things, seemingly minor actions, decisions, or habits, could have exponential effects in the opposite direction, tipping the scales towards justice?”
To hunt a more just world, Benjamin exhorted library staff to note the ways exclusion is built into our each day lives, showing examples of park benches with armrests at regular intervals. On the surface they seem welcoming, but additionally they make lying down — or sleeping — unattainable. This concept is taken to the acute with “Pay and Sit,” an art installation by Fabian Brunsing in the shape of a bench that deploys sharp spikes on the seat if the user doesn’t pay a meter. It serves as a strong metaphor for discriminatory design.
“Dr. Benjamin’s keynote was seriously mind-blowing,” said Cherry Ibrahim, human resources generalist within the MIT Libraries. “One part that actually grabbed my attention was when she talked about benches purposely designed to forestall unhoused people from sleeping on them. There are these hidden spikes in our community that we won’t even realize because they do not directly impact us.”
Benjamin urged the audience to search for those “spikes,” which latest technologies could make much more insidious — gender and racial bias in facial recognition, using racial data in software used to predict student success, algorithmic bias in health care — often within the guise of progress. She coined the term “the Recent Jim Code” to explain the mix of coded bias and the imagined objectivity we ascribe to technology.
“On the MIT Libraries, we’re deeply concerned with combating inequities through our work, whether it’s democratizing access to data or investigating ways disparate communities can take part in scholarship with minimal bias or barriers,” says Director of Libraries Chris Bourg. “It’s our mission to remove the ‘spikes’ within the systems through which we create, use, and share knowledge.”
Calling out the harms encoded into our digital world is critical, argues Benjamin, but we must also create alternatives. That is where the collective power of people could be transformative. Benjamin shared examples of those that are “re-imagining the default settings of technology and society,” citing initiatives like Data for Black Lives movement and the Detroit Community Technology Project. “I’m concerned with the way in which that on a regular basis persons are changing the digital ecosystem and demanding different sorts of rights and responsibilities and protections,” she said.
In 2020, Benjamin founded the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab with a goal of bringing together students, educators, activists, and artists to develop a critical and inventive approach to data conception, production, and circulation. Its projects have examined different elements of knowledge and racial inequality: assessing the impact of Covid-19 on student learning; providing resources that confront the experience of Black mourning, grief, and mental health; or developing a playbook for Black maternal mental health. Through the lab’s student-led projects Benjamin sees the following generation re-imagining technology in ways in which reply to the needs of marginalized people.
“If inequity is woven into the very fabric of our society — we see it from policing to education to health care to work — then each twist, coil, and code is a likelihood for us to weave latest patterns, practices, and politics,” she said. “The vastness of the issues that we’re up against might be their undoing.”
