To continue in a little more detail...

I read Ruha Benjamin's Race after Technology first and foremost as an early modernist concerned with technological "projects" and "improvements" in the seventeenth century, not "innovations" in the twenty-first. https://twitter.com/mccormick_ted/status/1254296119359803393

These are obviously very different technological and social contexts, but there are just as obviously links between them. It was (at least arguably) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that "race as a technology" (p.36) first took shape...

...and it did so, as many historians of slavery in the Atlantic world have shown, in connection with the increasingly systematic (and technologically demanding) exploitation of enslaved labour and colonized land in the Caribbean and the North and South American mainland.

Whether its framers then (any more than race science proponents today) would agree that its overt purpose was "to separate, stratify, and sanctify the many forms of injustice experienced by members of racialized groups" (p.36), I think few would deny that these were the effects.

More, it seems to me that seeing race as a "technology" -- a problem-solving device -- captures some of the otherwise strange ambivalences, ambiguities, and ironies of the way racism developed and was deployed in practice (see work on 18th-c ideas of degeneration and whitening).

So Benjamin's framing of things is illuminating precisely because of historical linkages between then and now. Indeed, she underlines the role that ignoring these links plays "No malice needed, no N-word required, just lack of concern for how the past shapes the present.” (p.60)

(to be continued)