BOOKS WE LIKE

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

James Baldwin

Race After Technology by Dr. Ruha Benjamin

“The animating force of the New Jim Code is that tech designers encode judgments into technical systems but claim that the racist results of their designs are entirely exterior to the encoding process. Racism thus becomes doubled – magnified and buried under layers of digital denial.”

Techano’s Take: This book is a must-read, and not just for technologists. The 21st-century promises technical innovations and advances beyond our imagination, but Race After Technology helps us see where existing injustices and inequities are amplified and accelerated by the technology meant to “save us”. Dr. Benjamin is a critical voice in the movement to not just accept the allure of technology but question how it can be better or if it’s even needed.

Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock

“Design justice practitioners are working to rethink extractive design processes and to replace them with approaches that produce community ownership, profit, credit, and visibility”

Techano’s Take: This book is informative, thought-provoking, and a deep-dive into the practical ways in which we can build and create things that better center, empower and celebrate the communities and individuals most often overlooked and marginalized in the design process.

We Want to Do More Than Just Survive by Bettina L. Love

“Too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. The real work is personal, emotional, spiritual, and communal.”

Techano’s Take: This book is a powerful and thorough look at how inequity and injustice is indoctrinated through the existing school-system and firmly makes the case for why we need something better. Bettina L. Love challenges us to not just accept “better” as enough. We must continue to push for a world where melanated (in her words, dark) people are fighting for more than just acceptance, basic dignity, and the feeling of overcoming adversity. We deserve a world filled with joy, freedom, and the opportunity to fulfill our dreams unencumbered by a system set-on and designed to deny us those very things.