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...
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.
Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal
Thanks to Benjamin’s willingness to thread moments of autobiography into her writing, the book’s narrative is embedded in the pasts and presents of her own life. It is a welcome shift of tone from most academic literature and it has a purpose: it grounds how social change must come from the personal and the everyday. We get candid insights into Benjamin’s experiences of early childhood, education systems, sibling mental health, parental loss, pregnancy and childbirth. These anchor a book that could have as easily lost itself to abstraction...
But back to Benjamin’s bigger point. What if we began to ‘name the world we cannot live without, even as we diagnose the world we cannot live within’? Readers could be forgiven that a book subtitled ‘how we grow the world we want’ (279) might offer a step-by-step guide for how we actually go about doing this. Benjamin, one gets the sense, knows that if it were that simple, it’d have been done already. In this vein, the examples with which Viral Justice furnishes readers don’t serve as quasi-steps in an instruction manual, but act as moments of inspiration to engage our imaginations about how we might now turn the soil in our own plots. In this way, Benjamin’s work offers a sketch rather than a blueprint; a compass instead of a map. It is also a unique and inspiring intervention, that comes at just the right moment.
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...
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.
“Viral Justice” critically examines police violence, racism and stress, the impact of COVID-19 in communities of color, education, work culture, medical racism, and building trust in communities of color that have been and currently are oppressed. Ruha Benjamin challenges socioeconomic conditions with aspects and recommendations of viral justice as a guide for social change. She contributes to the symbolic interactionist approach with the humanness of social conditions and vulnerability expressed in each chapter. Benjamin generously shares raw and candid experiences of her personal life including her upbringing, experiences in academia and child birth which create a deep sense of personable richness for readers. Benjamin’s work is a great opportunity for symbolic interactionists as well as all who are willing to do the work required for change and is applicable in all academic and nonacademic spaces because we all can facilitate action for change.
Politics and Prose Interview with Ruha Benjamin and Clint Smith
University of Arizona Race/Remix Podcast Episode 1
RSA Interview with Ruha Benjamin and Mandu Reid
Commonwealth Club World Affairs (CCWA) Presentation and Interview with Ruha Benjamin and Shabnam Koirala-Azad