In the spring of 2020, Ruha Benjamin received a DM on Twitter from her literary agent Sarah Levitt: “I’m hungry to read everything you have.” Inspired, Benjamin began writing and spent the first months of the pandemic conceiving what would become her new book, Viral Justice (Princeton University Press).
In the book’s introduction, Benjamin takes COVID-19—which we’re used to seeing in negative terms—and turns it on its head, exploring its potential to create hope and social change. She writes: “What if … we reimagined virality as something we can learn from? What if the virus isn’t just something to be feared and eliminated, but a microscopic model of what spreading justice and joy might look like in small but visible ways?”
Benjamin, a professor of African American studies, studies the social dimensions of science, medicine and technology. She joined Princeton in 2014, received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2017 and it was named an inaugural 2020 Freedom Scholar. She is the author of “The race behind technology: Repeal tools for the New Jim Code“and”Popular Science: Bodies and Rights at the Stem Cell Frontier.” She created Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab at Princeton, which brings together students, educators, activists and artists for it rethink and rework data for fairness.
In her new book, Ruha Benjamin offers a vision of how small changes can add up to big ones.
Benjamin I often use the idea of speculative world building in the classroomencouraging students to ask, “What if?” In Viral Justice, she adopts a world-building rubric where everyone can participate. By bringing up dozens of stories of real people whose individual actions and seemingly small decisions have affected widespread change for a more just world—what Benjamin calls “everyday uprisings and beautiful experiments”—she invites readers to cultivate their own plots of hope.
“[E]only one of us can weave new patterns of thinking and doing … drawing on our different abilities, interests, and dispositions,” Benjamin writes. “We need the loud and wild world builders as much as the quiet and studious ones. The last thing we need is for everyone to do or be the same!”
On October 11, she launches a Book tour in 20 cities across the US, Europe and Africa, including an appearance at 7:00pm on October 27th at the Princeton Public Library in an event co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books and the Department of African American Studies and the Princeton Humanities Council.
Here, Benjamin opens up about how writing Viral Justice offered her hope during the pandemic, why she shed her image as a trained sociologist in order to focus on the individual, and how it felt to put personal details from her life. her in a book for the first time.
You began work on this book during the first months of the pandemic lockdown in spring 2020. You wrote: “I quickly realized that writing was exactly the daily therapy I needed, turning all those apocalyptic headlines and social media announcements in something that can, in the end, offer some food.” Can food lead to hope? Would you share how the book illuminates what hope looks like to you now?
In Viral Justice, I consider hope as something that we I DOnot just something that we i feel and writing for me is a hopeful act. If “hope is a discipline,” as Mariame Kaba reminds us, that means we can practice hope. We can strengthen it, like a muscle, that powers our work. We can plant hope and water it so that it grows, fueling our efforts to make this world happier and more just.
To be clear, practicing hope does not mean ignoring or minimizing the gloom and doom that surrounds us. Quite the opposite. It means honestly reckoning with the state of the world, but not stopping there. It means refusing to succumb to fatalism or wallow in cynicism. In academia, especially, we can become self-righteous in our critical understanding. But then what?
That was the question that bothered me when I first started this book, and the original title was “Viral Racism.” But then I remembered what one of my mentors told me: “As researchers we spend so much time naming the world we not want, we can forget to imagine the world ourselves I DO they want.” This led me to Viral Justice. And though I dive deep into the many problems that make us sick, the book shines a light on the wide, wide range of people who are practicing hope by resisting and rethinking business as usual.
In the introduction to the book, you talk about your reluctance, as a sociologist, to focus on the role of individuals in social change. What was that ambivalence about and why did it feel important to embrace the individual?
We already live in a hyper-individualistic society, so I worried about the over-focus on the role of individuals in social change and how this might reinforce our default cultural environment. Plus, my training as a sociologist focused so intently on the role of social forces and institutional processes in shaping people’s lives that I get an allergic reaction when I hear talk of “individual responsibility” and “individual purpose,” especially in talk about inequality. and oppression. But this made me minimize the individual will to keep AND transforming the status quo. Social systems, after all, rely on each of us playing along or questioning the rules of the game.
“Viral Justice” shines a light on ordinary people who refuse to give up power, planting it in place.
As you focus on individuals, you unpack how seemingly small decisions and habits can spread “viral justice.” Can you tell us about an individual from the book – not someone famous, but an “ordinary person” – who captures your vision of how small changes can help build a fairer and happier world?
There are many a lot! So hard to choose. There are educators Calvin Terrell leading transformative justice workshops after school violence, “Ministry Nap” Tricia Hersey leading a movement to resist the grind culture and reappraisal take a rest as a form of compensation, Ron Finley“Gangsta Gardener” turning sidewalks into edible gardens and food deserts into food shelters, and Sarahn Henderson (who gave birth to my oldest son) working with black birth workers in Georgia toward a broad vision of reproductive justice in a state where community-based midwifery is not yet legal.
In addition to many individuals I profile, there are many groups and organizations we can learn from. Philly Jobs with Justice (JwJ), for example, has been fighting for fair treatment of working people since 1999, including a new campaign to ensure that wealthy nonprofits like universities are good neighbors and contribute their fair share to local public schools. What I like is how JwJ focuses on concrete changes — like increased pay and sick days for campus workers and increased university contributions to public schools — while also planting a broad vision of solidarity that unites students, unions , faith groups and communities. It’s that combination of short-term wins and long-term world-building that exemplifies viral justice.
The book is a mix of memoir and social analysis. In Chapter 5, “Exposed,” you talk about your experience as a senior at Spelman College, at age 23, married and pregnant, giving the commencement address a week after giving birth. Tell us about the Toni Morrison quote that inspired you at the time and how you hope that revealing your lived experiences and vulnerabilities will inspire readers.
I realized that if I’m asking people to reflect deeply on how their personal lives relate to their public engagements, then I’d better do the same. I can’t expect readers to be introspective if I wear the guise of a “cool, calm, collected scientist,” to borrow a phrase from the famous sociologist WEB Du Bois. One of the many experiences I share in the book is the one you mention, about what it felt like to be a young, pregnant, black college senior at Spelman.
One year ago, while researching for a senior thesis, I came across a 1989 Time interview with Toni Morrison [the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, who died in 2019] in which she was asked if the teenage pregnancy “crisis” closed off opportunity for young women. “Don’t you think these girls will never know if they could have been teachers?” the interviewer asked. Morrison replied:
“They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We must help them become brain surgeons. This is my job. I want to take everyone in my arms and say: Your baby is beautiful and so are you honey you can do it. And when you do, call me—I’ll take care of your baby.”
Although I wasn’t a teenager, I still felt the cultural stigma perpetuated by policymakers and popular media that comes with “being a statistic.” But I soon found myself spurred on by family, friends and midwives who had torn up that cultural script and seemed to take Toni Morrison’s gospel to heart, “Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it.That’s exactly the kind of stubborn love and support I hope Viral Justice encourages more of in readers.
The book’s subtitle, “How We Grow the World We Love,” begins your use of gardening analogies—the planter and the weeder, identifying your plot—to help readers imagine viral justice. And you’ve expanded the book into a monthly newsletter.”Planting the Future: A place for flourishing to balance all our movements of judgment.” What’s your best tip for helping readers find their own “plot” to cultivate prosperity, not doom??
I would say, think about what you love and what brings you joy, but also, what bores you? Of all the injustices in the world, what makes the blood boil the most? What keeps you up at night? “Plota” is about conspiring with others, it’s about rewriting cultural scripts and working in our own backyards. But most of all, it’s about getting our hands dirty in the messy work of world-building.
