Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want

by Ruha Benjamin Narrated by Ruha Benjamin

Overview

This audiobook narrated by Ruha Benjamin offers an inspiring and uniquely personal vision of how we can build a more just world one small change at a time

“A book as urgent as the moment that produced it.”-Jelani Cobb, Columbia Journalism School

Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.

Vividly recounting her personal experiences and those of her family, Benjamin shows how seemingly minor decisions and habits could spread virally and have exponentially positive effects. She recounts her father's premature death, illuminating the devastating impact of the chronic stress of racism, but she also introduces us to community organizers who are fostering mutual aid and collective healing. Through her brother's experience with the criminal justice system, we see the trauma caused by policing practices and mass imprisonment, but we also witness family members finding strength as they come together to demand justice for their loved ones. And while her own challenges as a young mother reveal the vast inequities of our healthcare system, Benjamin also describes how the support of doulas and midwives can keep Black mothers and babies alive and well.

This inspiring audiobook offers a passionate and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Winner of the Stowe Prize, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center"

Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards, Personal Development & Human Behavior Category

"A NationSwell Book of the Year"

Finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems

"Shortlisted for the getAbstract International Book Award 2023, Business Impact Category"

Paradigm Explorer

"[A] brilliant and impassioned book."

New York Magazine

"This is an openhearted, multilayered work that vibrates with ideas on ways to make a new world out of the interlocking crises of COVID-19 and racial capitalism. Progress may be a 'tear-soaked mirage,' as Benjamin writes, yet her book is far from devoid of a sense of humor or hope, full of ways to 'live poetically' while remaking the systems that have failed us."

Library Journal

07/01/2022

Benjamin (African American studies, Princeton Univ.; Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code) has spent much of her career conducting groundbreaking research about race, justice, and technology. Part memoir, this book is an emotional and thought-provoking wake-up shout to put an end to systemic discrimination and the racist rewriting of justice. The author believes that people are far more than the worst thing they've ever done; people must empathize with each other. Her stories and descriptions are mindful of George Orwell's 1984 and how, in the dystopian, 21st-century version of evolution, photos of young, Black men with a previous record have reportedly been used for target practice at a police gun practice range. VERDICT This a rich and engaging space for collective healing, integrity, and social commentary on the reasons why structural hurdles must be removed for racial justice to ever be achieved.—Alessandro Cimino

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2022-08-03
Small steps toward a just world.

Benjamin, a professor of African American studies at Princeton, offers an impassioned argument for the need to foster the “deep-rooted interdependence” that characterizes strong communities and to counter the ableism, sexism, racism, and classism that lead to injustice and inequality. Besides drawing on the findings of sociologists, epidemiologists, educators, and historians, among others, Benjamin shares her own experiences as the daughter of a Black American father and Indian-born mother of Persian descent, as well as the experiences of her family and friends, to expose the effects of racism in education, health care, policing and punishment, housing, economic opportunity, political participation, and scientific research. The victimization of her mentally ill brother by a “ravenous carceral system” informs her vision of police reform that would divert funding to housing, education, and community support. Turning to education, she exposes the “myth of meritocracy”—the idea that hard work and innate talent always lead to educational and professional success. In an “apartheid-like system” of education that is organized by race and class, success unfortunately breeds entitlement and “elitist delusions of specialness” rather than an awareness that achievement depends on luck: where, to whom, and in what economic stratum you were born. Benjamin reveals racism in hospitals, doctors’ offices, and the designs of research studies, where Black bodies are probed and tested but not provided adequate health care based on the outcomes of research. Impatient with the “datafication of injustice,” she claims we do not need more studies or more evidence. We need only the will to look at ourselves and “to individually confront how we participate in unjust systems.” Viral justice, argues the author convincingly, entails a redistribution of resources to overcome inequality and to create “communities of care” that support everyone’s needs. Each of us, she writes, must “question the roles and narrative you’ve inherited, and scheme with others to seed a different world.”

A powerful, urgent plea for individual responsibility in an unjust world.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176956610
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	10/11/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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