Strive to live in your own imagination, not someone else’s.
Having written about the intersection of power and status at meetings, I appreciate what professor of African American studies at Princeton University Ruha Benjamin shares in this 2019 video: “The New Jim Code? Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination“. She delves deeply into nonobvious ways that historic designs encode and perpetuate inequity.
Technology is one of the areas where culturally embedded designs impact society. My 2013 Meeting Professional column described how existing meeting technology becomes invisible. This induces stakeholders to ignore its stultifying influence on meeting process. Similarly, Benjamin explains how “technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era”.
Here’s the video:
If you prefer to read her remarks, there’s an introduction and a complete transcript here.
Here are three illustrative fragments:
- “In fact, we should acknowledge that most people are forced to live inside someone else’s imagination and one of the things we have to come to grips with is how the nightmares that many people are forced to endure are the underside of elite fantasies about efficiency, profit, and social control. Racism among other axes of domination helps produce this fragmented imagination, misery for some, monopoly for others.”
- “To paraphrase Claudia Rankine, the most dangerous place for black people is in white people’s imagination.”
- “…technology inherits its creators’ biases”
Living in someone else’s imagination is a societal problem that impacts all of us, especially marginalized groups. Let’s strive to live in our own imagination.