Faculty Highlight

On this episode, the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work and how his words can help us navigate the current moment.

We look back on the life and work of the great American writer and thinker James Baldwin.

Princeton University professor Ruha Benjamin joins Adam to reveal the issues at play at the intersection of technology and race, her concept of the “New Jim Code”, digital redlining and and how the technology can’t be relied on to solve what are ultimately social problems.

We are living with the current forms of the lasting regime of American imperialism on which this nation was founded. Understanding and teaching this mitigates against narratives of US exceptionalism that declare America is not imperialist and that are therefore useless for challenging or imagining alternatives to our present. Untangling art history’s involvement in the project of nation building addresses the past to imagine what could have been, in order to sustain what can be.