By Donald Gilpin

Ruha Benjamin
(John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Princeton University Professor Ruha Benjamin has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, widely referred to as the “genius” grant, worth $800,000, and she emphasizes the need to see this honor in the context of her support for the pro-Palestinian University students “who are calling for the University to divest from organizations supporting Israeli state violence against Palestinians.”

Benjamin, the University’s Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies, who describes herself as a transdisciplinary scholar and writer focusing on the relationship between innovation and inequity, was cited by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for “illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces social inequality and championing the role of imagination in social transformation.”

The Foundation’s announcement of the Fellowships went on, “By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices.”

In a post to the social media platform X on October 1, the day of the MacArthur announcement, Benjamin described how her phone call from the MacArthur Foundation telling her she’d won the award came on the morning after “a tense call with Princeton University officials investigating my support of students protesting the genocide in Gaza.” Benjamin was a faculty observer for the 13 University students who were arrested during a pro-Palestinian sit-in at Clio Hall on April 29 and are currently preparing to face trial in Princeton Municipal Court.

“It was an eventful week,” Benjamin wrote in her X post, describing the Foundation’s phone call. “What would have been a moment of pure joy and excitement was tempered by the sense that the same institutions that are quick to celebrate our accomplishments have been slow to respond to students’ demands to disclose and divest from genocidal violence.”

Benjamin’s comments on X were originally intended to serve as responses to the University Office of Communications’ request for information for a press release about her MacArthur Award, but when she requested that they include her comments about being investigated because of her support for pro-Palestinian student protestors or not quote her at all, the University reporters chose not to include her quotes.

In response to the University’s question about what the award means to her and her scholarship, Benjamin wrote, as posted on X, “As I understand it, this award is intended not only to highlight the work of individuals, but to incite the brilliance that we all possess by showing us the many forms that ‘genius ’ can take. This overlaps with themes in my most recent work on imagination as a collective resource.”

She continued, “So receiving this honor encourages me to continue beating that drum in my teaching, writing, and advocacy — that the many crises we face as people and planet are in part due to the fact that we are living inside the imagination of those who monopolize power and resources to benefit the few at the expense of the many. It motivates me to continue the work of radically expanding who gets a say in shaping our shared future.”

The University’s Office of Communications declined to comment on Benjamin’s support for the student protestors or her remarks on X that were not included in the University’s press release on the awarding of the MacArthur Fellowship.

Benjamin is one of 22 MacArthur Fellows for 2024, a group of anonymously nominated American scientists, artists, scholars, and activists who will receive the financial stipend with no strings attached distributed over the next five years.

“The 2024 MacArthur Fellows pursue rigorous inquiry with aspiration and purpose,” stated MacArthur Fellows Director Marlies Carruth, as quoted on the MacArthur website. “They expose biases built into emerging technologies and social systems and fill critical gaps in the knowledge of cycles that sustain life on Earth. Their work highlights our shared humanity.”

Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber, as quoted in the University press release, described Benjamin as “a strikingly original and creative thinker, writer, and educator who inspires her students and readers.” He added, “Ruha Benjamin’s innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship has brought critical new perspectives to our understanding of racial and social inequities in technology, science, and medicine.”

Benjamin joined the Princeton University faculty in 2014. She was a 2017 recipient of the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 2016 to 2017.

Her 2022 book Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want won the 2023 Stowe Prize for Literary Activism, which recognizes “a distinguished book of general adult fiction or nonfiction whose written work illustrates a critical social justice issue in the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Her 2024 book Imagination: A Manifesto “is for organizers and artists, students and educators, parents and professors, realists, and dreamers who are ready to take Toni Morrison’s instruction to heart: ‘Dream a little before you think,’” Benjamin stated.

Her research has been published in a number of different journals. She has delivered TED and TEDx talks and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian and other publications.

Other books written by Benjamin include Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013).

Benjamin received her B.A. in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from University of California-Berkeley, and she completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society. She was an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University before coming to Princeton.

In her responses to the University’s Office of Communications, Benjamin, who is on sabbatical this school year, noted that she is currently engaged in three different projects: Her lab is hosting the “Phoenix of Gaza XR” project, the first virtual reality lab documenting the destruction in Gaza; she’s working on a multimedia project that will eventually lead up to the creation of a new course in collaboration with a friend and colleague about the relationship between friendship and freedom dreaming; and she’s working on a new book, tentatively titled UStopia: A Bullsh*t Detective’s Guide to the Future, “investigating the ecological costs of emerging technologies and shining a light on Black and Indigenous knowledge about survival and sustainability buried under the rubble of progress — it’s about the relationship between artificial and ancestral intelligence,” she wrote.

In an October 4 telephone conversation, in which she described the MacArthur award as “a lovely, generous recognition,” Benjamin warned against “the weaponization and watering down of anti-discrimination law and rhetoric, specifically when it comes to charges of antisemitism” on college campuses.

Benjamin pointed out that Kenneth Stern, who drafted the first definition of antisemitism while working with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, recently claimed that the term antisemitism is being weaponized and is creating a “chilling effect” on university campuses, especially when it comes to silencing pro-Palestinian speech.

“One way to boil it down, speaking about what Stern is saying and what I and others are experiencing, is ‘When everything becomes antisemitism, nothing is antisemitism,’” she said, “so it actually makes it harder to fight antisemitism.”

She continued, “So in many ways this is part of the larger context in which students at Princeton are being penalized for doing things that we have seen other Princeton students do in previous generations when it came to South African apartheid, when it came to Black Lives Matter, when it came to fossil fuel divestment, but the specific kind of backlash and punishment that they are receiving through the courts and through the University speaks to a different context that we’re living in now.”