TECHNOLOGY
By Denim Fisher, Word In Black
An esteemed sociologist and Princeton University professor, Ruha Benjamin is renowned for her work at the intersection of race and technology. Speaking at her alma mater, she told an audience at Spelman College that their future as Black women — and their roles in the ongoing liberation struggle — begins with reflecting on the times and imagining an alternative world.
In a Q-and-A session that spanned history, Black literature, Afrofuturism, and even a call-and-response chant, Benjamin implored the audience to envision themselves as owning their collective power in a future they create. Racial healing can be challenging, she said, at a time when forces like the MAGA political movement actively roll back racial progress, and artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies marginalize Black people.
“What is powerful is often demonized,” she said. But important lessons for the future lie in the past.
For Black people, the “original A.I.” meant ancestral intelligence — the wisdom of elders and others who trod a similar path of hardship, Benjamin said. For them, she said, A.I. stood for the “abundant imagination” they possessed to see freedom for their people one day.
‘Revolutionary Change’
While the challenges Black women face can seem overwhelming, she reminded the audience that individual acts of resistance can make a difference: “If destruction is in the small, revolutionary change is in the small,” she said.
Benjamin was the inaugural speaker in this year’s Ida B. Wells-Barnett Distinguished Lecture Series, part of the school’s annual Social Justice Fellows Program. It was also a homecoming of sorts: Benjamin earned her undergraduate degree at Spelman in 2001.
The Wednesday evening event was crowded with Spelman College students, faculty, and alumni. Afterwards, some students discussed the message Benjamin had delivered. Their remarks are lightly edited for length and clarity.
Anaya Northern, Sophomore
“Her entire talk and lecture was about imagining a future. I thought this was interesting because in liberation theory, we often talk about dismantling the current structures that we have, and of course, that’s a necessary part of liberating ourselves and decolonizing our minds. But it doesn’t leave us with any solvency, it doesn’t solve our problems, it doesn’t eliminate the harm, until we begin to create a new society based on the principles we want to have.
All the DEI rollbacks that have been happening, and how we’ve been so focused on trying to get those back and restore the original place we had in white America. Instead, she encourages us to view it as an opportunity to build outside of those.
Black people and Black women have been harmed and have been told to go back to the people who have harmed them because those are the only situations in which they can live. Dr. Benjamin asks us to radically imagine a world where we don’t have to go to systems of oppression but instead create our own systems of healing.
Those systems come from our abundant imagination, the things that we as people in the 21st century can see that people before us couldn’t see, but also our ancestral intelligence, and the things people before us have seen that we can’t see because we’re in the future.”
Sophia Davis, Senior
“I struggle with having hope. What is there for me to dwell on in the future and to draw strength from? Her discussion of the future and who owns the future, my fear of the future, and my wondering about whether or not I should have hope, the fixation that it’s taken recently has had to do with a lot of what she talks about when it comes to this tech oligarchy, climate change, and genocide.
My concerns about the future have been influenced by all of these factors. When she was talking about exercising agency and our anemic view of what intelligence is and what is possible.
She did an exercise, “get real and be bold,” her politics and how she speaks to us, and how she forces us to acknowledge what is pragmatic and possible, what to hope for, what we can hope for, and what we might be able to achieve in our lifetime. She made it visceral. This resonated with me. The voices of dozens of people shouting ‘Get real’ and ‘Be bold.’
Sometimes racism feels like a big inevitability that I can’t touch and I can’t change. But I think those exercises, forcing us to imagine what the future will look like, and how we can play a role in making that better, are going to help me heal.”
Aria Nobles, First Year
“Ancestral intelligence instead of artificial intelligence, remembering and having a wider imagination in regards to where we come from and the way we formulate creative ideas, instead of feeling like we should be shot down before we even vocalize those ideas — that meant a lot to me.
It can feel like things are becoming very inauthentic; her reformatting the acronym was a very creative way to bring up an idea that we should all have. I like the ‘abundance of imagination‘ idea. She gave out statements, and we said, ‘Get real,’ and the other side of the room said, ‘Be bold.’ This is important because as time goes on, we feel like we should be less bold, especially as Black women.”
This editorial was originally published in Word In Black.
