Poured Over: Ruha Benjamin on Imagination: A Manifesto

By Jenna Seery / January 30, 2024 at 6:00 am

“My writing is always trying to open that up and to say — you can start here; you can start now.”

Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin reminds us that our imaginations already know what a better world looks like. From education to challenging our systems of oppression and more, this insightful work shows a new place for us all to start from. Benjamin joins us to talk about the split between imagination and technology, changing our narratives to tell new stories, the importance of community and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                   

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.         

Featured Books (Episode):

Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin
Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, producer and host of Poured Over and I’ve really been looking forward to this interview with Ruha Benjamin, who’s a professor at Princeton, where Matthew Desmond is and where Imani Perry was before she went to Harvard. So you know, you have some really great stuff there. She’s also the author of a new book called Imagination: A Manifesto. And I love this book, I’m so excited for this book to hit the world. And it’s a lot of different things. But mostly, it’s a call for us to sort of think about how we interact with technology, and where we’re going to let technology take us, and maybe some changes we want to think about making. And we don’t have to be more than ourselves to do this, right. Like, we don’t all have to be professors, we just have to show up for ourselves and our communities. And I love this idea. Ruha, thank you so much for joining us on the show. How are you?

Ruha Benjamin
I’m great. It’s such a pleasure to be here and be in conversation. Thank you so much for engaging Imagination.

MM
You have an opening line in this, but I may end up quoting you a lot in the course of this conversation, I’m just warning you now. But you say very plainly, at the beginning of the book, you want imagination to be something that runs wild that you use this word in an undisciplined way, a promiscuous way, in a porous way. And I kind of want to start there, because there are a lot of folks, I think, who think, oh, right imagination, we should be talking about fake stories, or picture books, or movies, or video games or things like that. And imagination is actually all of those thing and more.

RB
Exactly, it’s funny, you can talk about something like imagination, and yet still have little imagination about imagination. It’s like a very narrow set of things that we either associate with the art or when flights of fancy. And so part of it is to really be able to see imagination in things that we don’t associate with it in mundane realities. And also, I think part of that opening comes from the fact that in my own home discipline of sociology, we have this key concept of the sociological imagination. So as much as that inspires the work, I’m also trying not to limit myself to that disciplinary definition of what counts as the sociological imagination.

And also, one of the things I love about your newest book is that as you’re going through, you like to remind us to that, you know, science and technology. The way many practitioners approach their respective disciplines as a word is with wild imagination. Yes, examine how else do we get on the moon, or, you know, this, I’m just using, you know, the space shuttle or vaccines or any of the things that we can do. Like, now you can get a hip replacement or a knee replacement, and its practically outpatient.

And people are very open about it. Like when I was in grad student, studying the social dimensions of stem cell research, researchers would routinely talk about how childhood or teenage experiences with sci fi influenced their future research, they would reference Star Trek, they would reference these really far out scenarios. And so if they’re aware of it, I think we should be aware of it too, that the dichotomy between, let’s say, the arts and the sciences is much more porous than we often imagine.

And I think there’s still some folks who really are binary, and they’re thinking, like the arts have to live here. And science and tech has to live here. And I’m like, but science and tech is created by people. Art is created by people like we are the thing that’s the consistent between what we’re treating as like wildly separate disciplines. And you know, have I watched more than one episode of Black Mirror doing this? Yes. With my hands on my eyes. Of course I have. But again, like that’s exactly the kind of art that’s in conversation with what tech can do. Yeah, I have to say, I didn’t realize I had been misusing the word Luddite for a long time, I would say, Well, I’m not a Luddite. And it was your book, race after technology when I was like, Oh, wait, I’ve been misusing this because the Luddites are actually just really concerned about the social implications of rapidly advancing technology. And I know I’m not the only person who’s been misusing that phrase.

I have this critique, but I’m not a Luddite. But the Luddites were, the Luddite that we know them to be. They were raising questions about how work was being they were being displaced by these new machines. And so it was smashing the machine was about bringing attention to the human aspect of work.

There are so many things that I appreciate about being able to live sort of halfway online, right, like checking in early for flights, that’s a delight or having my boarding pass on my phone. There are some things that are amazing. A million times better or you know, just little conveniences, yes. And I do appreciate it. But I also think about it when I’m going through toll roads on the highway. And there isn’t a toll taker that, you know, there’s just a photo of my license plate. And that used to be someone’s job. And they used to raise a family on that salary, and have vacations and health insurance and on their home and their car and everything else and now it’s just a robot.

Yes, yes. And that, again, that convenience, the allure of making things easier for some hides the cost of that. So I often use the example of like, the fact that I can jump on my phone while we’re talking and before the conversation’s done, I can have like a steaming hot bowl of ramen waiting outside my office, convenient for me, but what does it take? Not just technically, but in terms of the human cost of getting that done so fast? And how was that the quality of that person’s work? How much are they being paid? How much are they being pressured to get there on time. And so part of it is to open up the frame so we can see everything and not just focus on our own well being and our own convenience.

Well, and not just well being and convenience, too, but, you know, what’s the cost, right? What’s the ultimate cost? And I’m not necessarily limiting that to the financial cost. There is a human cost, there’s a social cost there is even to an extent and emotional cost. And that expansiveness, you know, for all of our interconnectedness, right, like, you know, okay, I’m a knitter, it’s much easier to be a knitter now, you know, with technology, and you know, digital patterns, and all of these kinds of things, or being able to source things around. It’s great. But at the same time, it changes how we interact with each other, it changes how we interact with information, it changes how we interact with our communities, it changes how we define our communities.

Yeah, like, where would you get that information, or those patterns? Or that expertise in terms of the social connections that can get frayed or lost in the process that now you can just go to YouTube? You know? So thinking about that, yeah.

You also say, you know, imagination isn’t a luxury.

That’s right. So like, we think about schooling, and the kids that, whose imaginations are nurtured, yeah. But to think creatively, who get to infuse all of these, you know, different modes of learning and to project base, X, Y, and Z, and who has to follow the rules, who has to raise their hand, who can’t move without anyone, you know, getting in trouble. And so part of it is to look at, again, this parent, these parallel realities that start so early in terms of it’s not that we don’t have imagination, we’re hoarding imagination at first. And some entire groups of young people don’t get to cultivate their imagination, at least in traditional sort of institutions.

And part of your field of study, because it’s centered on data analysis, essentially, is really young. Of course, you’re pulling from history, and sociology, and anthropology and all of these different points. But the data piece, right, the data science piece, we’re all approaching it in an even, you know, it’s not just Princeton, its major universities everywhere, but the idea that we have billionaires, because we approach data differently.

And we’re in the early days, like you say, we’re in the early days. So oftentimes, when I’ll speak in different organizations, or companies, they’re like, okay, what are the best practices? Who’s doing it, right? Show us where to look. And I was like, no one, really, everyone’s really in the early days of realizing that data is not neutral, that technology is not object, like we’re just in the awakening moment. So people haven’t actually honed different modes of approaching these fields, in a way that I could be confident to say, follow this example. Right?

It is like for all of the discomfort that some of this brings, right? Like we’re all in a very strange moment, culturally, you’re ultimately very hopeful about what we can do. And I think that’s really important right now, because it really the world is not in a great place. As you and I are taping this interview. The world is simply not in a great place, but the idea that we are capable of finding avenues of chain. I think that’s a really important message for all of us to hear right now. And you there’s a moment in the book where you sort of have this let’s not say step by step plan, but you make some suggestions for exercises, and I’m hoping that when people pick up the book, they’ll spend some time there.

Yes. And so I think I think you’re right. It’s a hopefulness. But it’s a very stubborn hopefulness. It’s against all the odds, right? It’s also this idea in the same way that imagination isn’t a luxury. hopefulness isn’t a lot like if, if the world as it’s currently configured creates for you, and those you love, premature death, closes opportunities creates these parallel universes in which you can’t thrive, then you either submit to that and throw your hands up, or you have the mindset of like, by all means necessary, we will change this. And so it’s a kind of militant stubborn hopefulness that if the status quo is creating a unlivable, uninhabitable world, which it really is, for all of us who’ve got it, then, you know, like Baldwin would say, I can’t be a pessimist need to be a pessimist means you’ve decided that human life is an academic matter. And although I’m an academic, I won’t sort of submit to that. And so I think part of it is, it’s a matter of kind of life and death survival for many people. So I who am I to say, oh, we can’t be hopeful, because everything is going wrong.

And you’ve also, in other interviews, and in your own biography, have mentioned that your family was sort of your first classroom. And can we bring your parents into this for a second, because I love your background, and I love the story. And I just, I also really love the idea of little Ruha. My family has a petri dish, I’m going like this is where it all starts. Because you clearly have been thinking about all of this for a really long time, and your body of work represents sort of this continuum. And also your dad turned you on to one of the Star Trek spin offs, fascinated by all of this.

You know, a part of it is to realize, like when we talk about innovation, innovation isn’t just like, what billionaires are doing or what tech is doing. It’s like thinking about innovation, how people innovate in their lives, they do new things that haven’t been done before. And so part of it is to expand who counts as an innovator what do we consider to be innovation. And so me thinking about that leads me to my parents who, you know, they met in Southern India at a Baha’i conference, and my father’s African American, my mom’s Iranian descent, but born and raised in India, the day after they met, they decided to get married, my mom gave a talk at this conference. And I guess they, you know, they connected after that and talked for the whole day. And it took about two and a half weeks to connect with all the parents and family. And so just that knowing the stigmas, knowing the barriers for kind of cross-cultural connection, much less marriage is like, already an innovation. Because we don’t get all the time. And then it’s not just limited to them. It’s the embrace of both sides of the family. So lots of people do it. But then there’s all kinds of hostility and exclusion and cutting people off. And there was none of that, like both sides of the family, were really supportive. And so that was my starting point to think, Oh, you can live your life differently. You can make different choices, we do inherit these patterns, social behavior, ways of thinking and seeing each other that seem to overdetermine our choices, and narrow, often our choices in life. But you don’t have to, like you can choose differently. And so that was again, not something I was thinking about when I was at little Ruha, but looking back, certainly realizing like oh, the people around me who don’t necessarily have fancy degrees, who aren’t working in labs, who aren’t considered innovators. They’re actually my first teachers when it comes to questioning what we consider natural, what we consider good and, and really making different choices in life. And so that was a starting point for me.

And tech is a form of storytelling, right? Like if we think about a lot of the current sort of American mythology, right, garage startups, and it doesn’t matter this and this by the skin of our teeth and holding on, genius, all of it, all of it. It’s just, it’s not that far removed from sort of, you know, the mythology that we were taught as tiny people right about whether it’s the opening of the American West, or its, you know, Greek and Roman gods standing on hills and smiting people or whatever, it’s fascinating to me how much the threads of the story kind of stay the same?

The kinds of you know, tech developments that we take for granted that we’re carrying around in our you know, you know, pockets and, and that make life easier, and they’ll require had massive mythologies and stories to conjure to get us to think that this is a necessity. And so part of it is to question those. But also think about what stories aren’t we telling what other ways of thinking about this? Have we left out or scrapped or considered backwards? And so one of the threads throughout imagination is, you know, looking for the stories that have been buried. Yeah, so a colleague of mine has written a book about low tech, local, traditional ecological knowledge, all of these communities around the world who have been engaging in practices around the environment that are sustainable that we need to learn from, if we’re going to move forward, right. But oftentimes, these communities are considered primitive. And yet exactly these knowledges that we need to embrace and learn from rather than listening to the single stories coming out of Silicon Valley. Right?

Did writing Imagination change you? Or does it sit on a continuum, because I do actually feel like, and I say this having read Viral Justice, and Race After Technology, but it feels like your thinking has gotten a little tighter on the subject, like I see the origins of this book in the earlier work. Yeah, now you’re getting really sort of, it’s fun to see, it’s really fun to see your development as a writer. And I’m just wondering sort of where you are now.

You know, I think it was after Race After Technology came out. And I had to start going on the road and talking about it. And so I had to kind of distill certain things that aren’t actually fleshed out in Race After Technology. But in speaking about it, I needed to synthesize and in doing so Imagination, as a battleground concept is where I really started to kind of talk about it a lot. But I hadn’t written it. I was just like, there was more of this kind of like more of my teacher mode, like what do we learn from Race After Technology that wasn’t actually in the book. And so you’re right to see that kind of synthesis happen. And I think what also was part of what you’re picking up on is that imagination is really, in terms of audience, much more explicit, like, look, thinking about education, thinking about K through 12, education, thinking about students and how their imaginations are stifled. So part of it is that the audience in my mind as I was writing was more focused. And so it allowed me to kind of be more pointed, and what do I want you to get out of this. And so it was a challenge, certainly the whole idea that I have to get it under. So I did have to cut out big chunks. That was painful at first. But it is what it is.

I’m sorry for you as the writer, but as the reader, I have to say, I’m really happy with the experience that I had. So if that helps at all, because I’ve read it now a couple of times, and the first time I read it cold. And then the second time, obviously you’ve your reading shifts, right when you’re preparing for something like this, and the details change a little bit, and whatnot. But all I could really think of was how many people I know who need this book that will be getting it from me. Because I just it’s so accessible. And it’s really earnest, and it is hopeful. And yes, it’s a little pointing because sometimes we need to hear things that maybe we don’t think we need to hear. And yes, actually, we need to hear them. But you are so engaged with possibility. And that, to me is a wildly optimistic view of the world. Like, yeah, things are broken in a lot of ways. And it is a rough moment to be human. But let’s not throw up our hands.

No, I mean it I think if I wasn’t a teacher, if I wasn’t a mom, you know, I think part of it is like if I was just thinking about my own little life, I think I might get more mired down in cynicism and kind of impossibility But precisely because I’m in relation to the next generation that’s looking to me for like, okay, I can help you diagnose what’s ailing us, but I can’t leave it at that. Like I learned that early on as a teacher like in setting up my classes, like I can’t talk to you about you know, police violence or housing injustice or healthcare disparities, without also showing you some ways forward the way that organizations groups and movements are, are working to counteract that and think of other possibilities. And so one of the first classes I taught early on was racist, socially constructed colon now what questions like we get it, we get, this is the problem. Now what about it and it’s that like, I’m always asking myself that now what?

I love that now what because one of the things you talked about early In this new book Imagination: A Manifesto to is this idea of false binaries, right? Like, and I mentioned this before, where it’s sort of like art sits on one side, and tech sits on the other. And a lot of our storytelling and a lot of the things we have taught ourselves over time has sort of settled us into these false binaries. And one of the things you’re pushing us to do with this book is saying, well, it’s not just old story versus new story. It’s like, what if they’re new ish? Yeah. And I love this new ish. What if they’re new ish stories? Now? What if we’re between stories? And again, like, like, brings us back to possibility? But can you just elaborate a little bit on that for people because I think it’s, it’s just, it’s a really good concept. And I don’t want to miss explain it.

I mean, part of it is that the big bad boogeyman are easy to see and point out, you can kind of create a straw man of like, these are the bad guys, we need to be able to recognize that. But I think what’s even more important and harder to hone as a capacity is to see when harmful things are packaged in kind of a do good ethos in the veneer of shiny tech progress. And so it’s that like, third category of things being newish where it feels on the surface, like there’s something new going on here. The fact that like you said, you can do you know, quickly plug in and get things done. But what is that? What are the harms that aren’t exactly new that that’s reproducing. And so if we just take, you know, what’s been in the news this past year in terms of advances in generative AI and chat GPT, and all the rest? Part of it is that what we’re being sold as new, high advanced artificial intelligence relies on masses of human labor that’s denigrated, and really diminished, which is not a new phenomenon. It’s this oftentimes the same categories of people, this work and labor being outsourced to places like the Philippines or Canada. And so that element of it is the ish part. It’s like, wait a minute, the exploitation that gives us this shiny new convenience, is repackaging old, exploitative models of labor that we need to pay attention to, and push back against.

And also deep learning, right? Deep learning is the is the mathematical and scientific theory, that sort of drives all of AI, deep learning is still based in human beings, until we sort of fixed the larger stuff. We are in fact setting ourselves up to continue to repeat things where it’s like, Wait, haven’t we learned? Yeah. Haven’t we figured out that this, in fact, is not? This is really not a great idea. We’re just like, a hamster on a wheel and we’re constantly doing things.

We want to get off exactly want to get and so like I often say, with deep learning, what we’re being told, is, it’s like this computation, advanced computational capacity. But that computational depth in deep learning, without social and historical depth, in my view, superficial learning, like it’s just the surface. And so what we have to do is think about what other knowledge is, what other forms of intelligence are getting scripted out, or getting written out? Is intelligence is all this being modeled on. And those kinds of questions that I think are a good starting point to push back against the newer stories. But then, and again, this is my like, teacher mode is like, what’s new? What really new stories do we want to create? What do we actually want to flourish? And so not just ending with critique, but being creative in the process?

I’m gonna go back to Star Trek for a second. I’m not a Star Trek person. But like, in sort of the cultural Pantheon like I have a working understanding, right? The idea, though, that like this represented the future and all of its different, I mean, there have been multiple incarnations, and I forget the one that your dad had the videotapes of, but I just you end up living in the South Pacific. And really, all you have is books, and your dad’s videotapes, because your parents were educators, and you obviously went where they went. But there’s so many people I know a lot of them are book people and film people now, but who grew up sort of on this idea that there was this future, this ultimate future, right, there was genuine diversity, and everyone kind of got along and you know, you made cool stuff. And, you know, you could do whatever you wanted on a hologram deck, and blah, blah, blah. You know, I sort of think about where we are, and it’s a little more Black Mirror than it is Star Trek.

Totally.

And maybe there isn’t a real answer to this, but like, how do we put the brakes on it? Right? Like we have entire generations now of young people who’ve grown up digitally, like I’m on the cusp of like my brother I used to fight over the phone, like we had a phone in the kitchen on the wall, and like we would fight over who got to use it with my brother. So you know what I’m talking about. And like, you know, we would use the pantry as a phone booth. Because we were not allowed to have phones in our rooms, we didn’t have televisions in our like, it was just a sort of different way of living. And now we’ve got this generation of younger people, and in some ways it has benefited them. I mean, you can find community in a different way you can really be less isolated in some ways. And in other ways. It’s kind of like, well, hold on, that doesn’t seem to be working for you. Yes. And it’s the hold on that doesn’t seem to be working for you that I’m more concerned about as just a member of our society and our culture where I’m just like, Are you guys okay?

I know. So that means it’s funny that you mentioned Black Mirror, because I teach a class on Black Mirror, partly because there’s so many lessons, it’s literally reflecting back at us things that we necessarily can’t see about our relationship with technology. And so I think part of it is to figure out which tools and technologies are not fostering the kinds of sociality and connections that we value and getting rid of those. The other is to not again, not the against technology, but to encode a different imagination, like what kind of imagination do we want to actually get encoded into the design of these new tools. But unless we’re carving out space for the next generation of technologists and humanists to think through that, then we’re always going to be stuck with what we have now. Right. And so part of it is the implications for education and for training. And for the very early tracking of students into that binary of like, so many people are like, I’m not a techy person, I’m not a science-y person getting pushed out of those fields. So they can’t ever be part of the conversation to be able to think through those new stories. I think the implications are much younger than we often in terms of how we should be thinking about this.

And again, we’re talking about changing the narrative, we’re talking about changing the story, which, you know, when I say it like that, it sounds a little flippant, and it sounds and I don’t actually intend it that way. But sometimes, when you have to make a monumental shift, you do have to break it down into a tiny little piece. Yes, yes. And, of course, you know, that tiny little piece has many, many pieces attached to it. I’m not saying this is something we can do overnight. But I am hoping that we can change our approach as human beings and just say, hey, wait a minute, why we’ve been telling ourselves this version of the story that, you know, I’ve succeeded solely by my own will I have succeeded solely because I set my mind to it, or I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. I’m just picking on easy examples, right? Like these are these are such common narratives, when in fact, systems get in the way. Yes, right. The machinery gets in the way of the humanity.

I think going to that point, I think, you know, the stories that are harmful, again, are easy to pick out Unicode in terms of the hyper competitiveness, the divisiveness, all of that, but part of it is to think about even the stories that purport to be moving us in a better direction. Oftentimes, they are limited in really important ways that we need to question those quote unquote, progressive stories. So let’s just take you know, this idea of allyship and helping the underserved and you know, doing things that we would code as good even those are limited because they fail to recognize that my well being and fate is bound up with your so when you are something to make the world more loving, or more just, it’s not charity work, you’re not doing it for me. You’re doing it, it’s selfish. It’s something that boomerangs back to you. And I think, like shifting even this, the ideas around why we do what we do, that it’s not this philanthropic charity model of change, but it’s thinking about our interconnectedness. And so that if you do x, y, and z, that is actually creating a more livable world for you to not just for me.

I spend a lot of time in both New York and Los Angeles, and you know, when you’re in New York, you’re kind of in the mass of humanity, right? We’re all taking the subway; we’re all walking on the sidewalk. And LA there’s starting to be more of the walking around on the sidewalks kind of thing. People still don’t use the subway. I’m just like, really, it’s very useful. We spend a lot of time in our cars, obviously in Los Angeles. And so you’re sort of the opportunity to sort of randomly connect with just pure random human beings in your orbit, right like it’s is much more likely to happen in a city like New York versus a city like Los Angeles. And you can kind of feel the difference, right? You grew up in LA I know you know what I’m talking about, like even when you grew up in a community, like the one you grew up in, where your grandmother is right there saying, Oh, no, you it’s kind of wild to me how much in this interconnected a try that we’re all still kind of doing. Stand over here, I’m on my side of the line, I’m on my side of the hedge, I’m on my side of the street.

The idea that our environments were shaped by our environments, and we hate it. And so, you know, if the opportunity to connect with our neighbors, because of the way that the infrastructure is the way that neighborhoods are deeply segregated. Today in in numerous ways, all those factors into what’s possible for us personally, right, the able to experience these connections. And so I think, you know, it moves beyond this idea of kind of like individual will to do something that we actually have to create the conditions, those types of connections.

So what are those conditions look like beyond walking down the street? Or taking the subway together? I mean, how do we foster a wider sense of community?

Yeah, so I just got back from LA last night, the way that I saw it happening. So there was a group, intergenerational group, that at the beginning of COVID, when all the gyms closed, they just started walking outside and walking in this neighborhood, where I’ve grown up starting at one park walking through Kenneth Hahn going to the Culver City stairs and back, every single day of the week, they walk and different people come bring guests, etc, etc. And so this is just one simple example of people who would normally be cooped up in their own little, you know, neighborhood or, or house, saying, you know, what, we’re gonna carve out time in our routine, our everyday life. And in the course of that you meet new people, you make new connections, what I learned when I joined the group this January is that it’s not simply about the walking the exercise, that time, it’s actually growing a village. So now, for example, there was a woman that was part of the is part of the group in her 60s That she was disconnected from her own family. So they didn’t recognize the early signs of dementia, but the group did, because they saw her on such a regular basis, they started noticing little changes, not only were they able to recognize it, but now they’ve created a support system where they pick her up, they help her do all these things. And so that’s one simple example where just change, like creating the conditions of interacting and meeting has this kind of ripple effect beyond the explicit goal that were why it started to actually creating these bonds of connection that end up having life and death consequences like for this individual. And so just one example of many in a place that we LA, you don’t think about something like a village, taking shape, and it does.

But also when people talk about, you know, sort of the old days with a nostalgic tone, as it were, I mean, part of what they’re talking about is not just the familiar, whatever shape that takes, but also that sense of community. I mean, in the past, people didn’t always move very far from their families kind of thing. But the idea that we could create that now. It’s whatever that looks like, right? Like found family is amazing and we can do that.

We can and we are and part of it is like shining a light on it. So people can realize it doesn’t take you know, multiple degrees or you know, a lot of planning, it’s like stepping outside of our, our comfort zone and you know, connecting with people who you know, need it.

And I think part of what we’re seeing too, is, you know, some people call it an epidemic of loneliness, but people are feeling really disconnected. Yeah, really wildly disconnected. It is not healthy for us. We are social creatures, even when you know, some of us also need to stare at a wall every now and again. But we are human beings that we are like we do need to be around other people. And I’m hoping that folks who read Imagination: A Manifesto, do understand that we’re talking about tiny changes. I mean, I love the story of the walking group that you just hold. I love the idea that you can figure out that someone needs a hand and just be there to give it to them and not in an intrusive way, either. It’s not like you’re swooping in and saying I will fix all of the things. It’s just Oh, I can do this. Yes. Yes. That’s so important. Yeah, it’s really so important. I mean, or just showing up for someone where, you know, you just show up, you just say I’m here. I mean, I don’t know what that means in the grand scheme of things. But sometimes you just need to know that there’s another person acknowledging you in the world.

That we are willing to accept that help and support, because one of the things we’re fighting up against is the story of the rugged individual that, oh, I can do everything. And that needing help is a sign of weakness and character failure. And so again, thinking about what is the story that we’ve inherited, that’s actually making us miserable. And so and saying, Actually, no, you know, like, we all are vulnerable, we all need help. And accepting it, it doesn’t mean you’re like a less, you know, a lesser human being, it’s, it’s ours, it’s our actual, you know, statuses, you know, we need each other. And so once we just get over and push back against those stories, we can create new ones, where those assumptions about individualism and independence, as opposed to interdependence, aren’t ruling us and making us miserable.

Well, and there’s another piece of that too, where you know, romantic love isn’t all of the story and that there are many varieties of love and love is hard sometimes, sometimes showing up for other people is not the easiest thing to do. And then I think that’s another story we’ve told ourselves where it’s just like, romantic love is this thing we all aspire to but, you know, and actually…

My wonderful mentees, Priya and Winona, they call each other their platonic life partners. Because they’re like, you know, what, we’re life partners. We’re not married, we’re not, you know, in that kind of relationship. But we need new language and vocabulary to say the variety of relationships that we need to sustain us, and that relying on the nuclear family and I always say, nuclear, tick, tick, like it’s a bomb, it’s like, we need to move beyond that limited idea of how we organize ourselves socially. Because if it can’t sustain all the needs that we have, as individuals, we need a much greater plethora.

And also, if you go back to the data, okay, I’m gonna be a super nerd for a second. If you go back to the data, marriage doesn’t seem to work for a lot of folks across class, across gender, across race, it, marriage does not seem to work, the institution of marriage does not seem to be working.

We’re asking it to do too much. It’s, you know, not a great corollary. But similarly, my critique of policing is like, we put on the shoulders of police, all of these other needs in terms of mental health and housing, insecurity. And all of these things. We’re asking this one institution to do, which it’s not created to undertake. And we wonder why oh, why? Why are we having all of this violence and these problems, it’s like, we need to rethink the function of these, whether marriage or policing, etc.

And that’s where imagination comes in. Right? And if you’re a generation that’s grown up on science fiction and fantasy, right, like, shouldn’t you have this sort of capacity, right to ask questions, and I’m smiling thinking about it? Because the possibility really is yes, there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done, and there’s some heavy lifting that needs to be done. But anyone can sit down and think something through and maybe come up with some and then the question is, where do you go from it? But I feel like a lot of people are sort of stymied a little bit and not even in a place where they think they can sit down and be like, Hmm, I noticed this thing, this thing doesn’t work.

I think part of it is that the all of the Sci Fi and speculation it’s like ghettoized in the realm of fantasy and escapism. Like we don’t think we can actually apply that to policy to infrastructure to social organization, like taking that capacity to see and ask, what if, what if we did X, Y, and Z? That is a starting point for fiction and a starting point for, you know, these other worlds let’s apply to our world. Let’s not accept what we have.

I’m going to quote you again for a second. I’m so many great lines from this book, sort of towards the end of things you say a critical approach to imagination also requires us to consider that the way forward is never guaranteed to be better than the present. So we do have to be a little patient. I’m not great with patience. I will totally admit that. I am not the most patient person in the world, but I do feel like it’s something I could learn like If you quote, there’s an activist. And I’m sorry, I’m blanking, but hope is a discipline. Okay, thank you. And that’s such a great line, right? Like hope is not like a squishy, warm, stuffed animal, I hope is actually like hope and love are hard.

They are.

But idea that we have to get through to the other side, and then it may not like it may be messy and uncomfortable for a while, like that’s something.

Absolutely. And when we are trying to kind of rush forward, we often skip over important things. And so part of this, that sort of, like urgency can backfire, because then we’re racing so hot, you know, fast to whatever the next thing is, then we buy Oh, wait, this thing, new thing that we created actually looks a lot like the old thing, because we haven’t taken time to really think through all aspects of it. And so we can think about that, and so many in terms of tech advances that we see. Right?

Well, I mean, I’m just going to drag out the metaphor for a second. But you know, tech is buggy, right? Like, it takes a couple of different iterations. You know, early on, I learned the hard way, like maybe the updates didn’t need to happen right away, because maybe you should just let it sort itself out first, and not have a surprise when reboot, you’re finally like, oh, yeah, entirely sure. But then again, I never thought I’d be walking around with a supercomputer in my pocket. I mean, I was perfectly happy with a Blackberry typing away, and it just did exactly. And then my Blackberry died in my hand, I was just like, what happened here? And now? I mean, I can, I mean, I’m not saying I could fly a space shuttle off my phone. But it’s wild to me that I walk around, yes, with a supercomputer in my pocket. Like, it’s just what in the world? does all of this mean? I mean, ultimately, I know you’re optimistic. And I know, you understand that there’s a lot of work to be done. But what’s next for you? I mean, you’re the founding director of the Ida B. Wells, justice data lab at Princeton, not a small thing. You sit on multiple boards and committees at the university and without plus your teaching, and your writing books. So how does this all come together for you going forward?

I think, well, up until now, it’s been possible because of the cross currents between what I’m teaching what I’m writing what I’m talking about in terms of public speaking, and so they inform each other and help me and so much of my writing is like how I teach. So if I’m jumping around to different examples, it’s because I’m trying to keep my students attention. So I know, reading can be a bit abrupt like, Wait, why did she go from this to actually…

And again, I’ve read the book twice. And I’m not saying this just because you and I are sharing a screen right now. No, I really quite liked the pace. And I really quite liked, pivoting as you did, it did not feel abrupt. To me, it felt like you were pulling from all of these different pieces. Yeah. And again, I’m not really a sci fi person. But of course, I know who Octavia Butler is. And if I read, I’ve read a couple of the books, you know, black mirror a couple of episodes, Star Trek, I’m missing entire, you know, pieces of canon. But I understand the references. And that’s the thing that matters to me that there is an opening. For anyone, I think coming to this book, that you don’t have to be an academic. And you don’t have to be an actor that you don’t, you can just be a reader who says, Ah, this is a really interesting idea, I want to see where it goes. I love that.

I mean, partly what I’m fighting against is the narrowing of who gets to even think and talk and imagine these things like that. It’s this small sliver of humanity. So my writing is always trying to open that up and to say, you can start here, you can start now. And so the references to pop culture to media is part of my sort of pedagogical approach of saying, Come on into this conversation. You don’t have to have all these prerequisites to be able to do that. And to your question about what next I’m thinking about this relationship between technology and ecology. So if, as for the labor behind the tech, now I’m thinking about the planetary costs, the environmental dimensions of what it takes to have that supercomputer in our pockets in terms of the minerals in terms of energy cost. And so as much as I can, I’m trying to pull back the screen so that we can actually see demystify these tools. And the question whether or not the cost of it is worth it.

It’s something I think about a lot and I know certainly generations coming up behind us like your students generation, your son’s generation. I don’t see how these kids can go through the day without thinking about it. Right.

Fortunately, like they’re more attuned like, we’re ruining for them. And they’re like, get out of the way, so that we can make better choices in terms of the ecology, in terms of society.

I think they might have a point. In cases. I mean, I think there’s a little bit of cultural exchange that can happen between generations, I’m not ready to throw in the towel entirely. But I do think that we need to open the lines of communication in a way and not just say, well, that’s adorable, you’re 12, the way people bring their own experience to reading a book. Of course, they do that with conversation. Of course, they do that with someone they’ve just met. And I would hope that we could all get to a point where maybe, you know, we figure out how to listen a little better. Because I think if we don’t do that, we’re really just going to end up smacking our faces into a wall, when instead of just figuring out how to move forward, we’re all just going to be, you know, completely pied and that’s not helpful.

We have so much emphasis on public speaking, but not public listening, like that is a skill that we need to actually take seriously a muscle we need to build, I just want people to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle. And in the book, I leave you in terms of the last chapter with a set of tools and prompts and questions that can help you individually but especially in a group setting, to develop that capacity and muscle, not only to make things more fun and playful and creative, that is important, also, because we’re living inside of the deadly imagination of a small set of the human population. And so to push back against that, we all have to you know, again, understand the stakes and all that capacity together so that we can create something different.

I think we can do this, it’s going to be messy, it’s going to be hard. It’s not going to be overnight but I am going to stick on the side of optimism and I’m gonna work on my hopeful muscle and you know, just give people time and space to readImagination: A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

That’s an honor thank you for having me.