Abstract
Nearly three years after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent national uprising that sparked global conversations about anti-Black racism, scholars, activists, and community stakeholders alike continue to grapple with strategies for achieving long-term transformation and social justice. While macro-level changes remain crucial in developing an antiracist world, Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice calls us to consider our everyday interactions that reproduce and maintain the unequal systems we seek to abolish. Drawing on a wealth of interdisciplinary scholarship, grassroots movement work, poetry, and personal narrative, Benjamin proposes “viral justice,” or a “microvision of social change . . . which we seed in the present as alternatives to our fracturing system” (p. 11). By examining “fracturing systems” such as the carceral state, education, healthcare, Big Tech, and academia, Benjamin argues that viral justice from institutional violence begins from the ground up with individual reflection and continues through collective action and recognition that “our fates are linked, even when our antisocial system tries to convince us otherwise” (p. 16).
Through this viral justice lens, Benjamin not only explores the role of anti-Black racism across multiple institutions, but she also highlights both historical and modern-day examples of individuals who resist anti-Black racism within their own lifeworlds. Given the longstanding history of racialized state violence against Black communities through education, surveillance technology, and policing, Benjamin invites us to cultivate an “abolitionist ethos” that rejects punitive categorizations between the deserving and the undeserving. This dichotomy between “good” and “evil” only functions to maintain racial hierarchies that undermine community safety. Benjamin writes, “If retribution is riveting, a pathological source of unity, then we have to ask whether it is possible to foster social cohesion without an outcast and enemy. Does human bonding rely on someone else’s bondage?” (p. 78). For Benjamin, this action does not involve reforms often touted as transformative (e.g., police trainings), or “trust-making projects” for “death-building institutions” (p. 230). Instead, this social cohesion should be rooted in love, for “Love, I now believe, is the brick, mortar, foundation, and pillar of the world we’re trying to build where we can be vulnerable but not exposed” (p. 186). It is in this spirit of radical love that Benjamin compels us to invest in alternatives to the criminal punishment system by showcasing grassroots organizations including Creative Interventions and the Oakland Power Projects that have been on the front lines of developing community-based alternatives to policing and incarceration.
What I find particularly powerful about Benjamin’s work is her own commitment to self-reflection and collective solidarity through individual action. Chapter 5’s “Exposed” tells the painful history and ongoing crisis of obstetric violence against Black women. While the presence of doulas and midwives led to healthier outcomes for Black women, the medicalization of childbirth—rooted in racist notions of Black women’s lack of expertise—replaced Black midwives with predominantly White male doctors (and eventually white women nurses) within hospital settings. Benjamin connects the ongoing crisis of Black women’s birth mortality to her decision to hire a local Black midwife for her first childbirth. Together, they built a relationship of trust that lessoned the potential institutional stressors (and killers) Black women encounter within healthcare institutions. Reflecting on this experience, Benjamin writes, “we can literally be one another’s pain relief through similar forms of care and accompaniment” (p. 200).
Benjamin also highlights how structural conditions of anti-Black racism leave us “weathered”—and in the worst-case scenarios, dead, due to the “social stressors and oppressors” that refuse to alleviate us of “the grind” culture. To facilitate spaces that disrupt weathering, Benjamin asks us to radically reimagine our relationship to rest as a part of our own self-preservation. For she argues that
rest, like healthy foods, clean water, and fresh air, is essential. Rest, in other words, is not extravagance we must earn, or a getaway we must save up for. . .viral justice means each of us doing our part to shift norms and patterns of expectation when it comes to labor, productivity, and rest. (p. 144)
In doing so, we reject longstanding stereotypes that equate Black rest with laziness and instead look to organizations such as Black Power Naps to demonstrate the necessity for Black rest.
In the spirit of spreading “justice and joy in small but perceptible ways . . . in our own backyards” (p. 11), I reflect heavily on the role academic research plays in reproducing anti-Black racism. Benjamin reveals the ways her own academic institutions have contributed to Black degradation and suffering through the housing and fetishization of Delisha Africa’s and Katricia “Tree” Africa’s remains—two children violently murdered in Philadelphia’s 1985 MOVE bombing. Used as anthropological amusement, the university’s display of Delisha and Katricia’s remains mirrored a centuries-long tradition of Black exploitation in the name of “scientific advancement.” For those who analyze race and racism within communities of color, have we fully grappled with the history our own academic institutions hold in reproducing structural violence within the very communities our research proposes to “help?” If so, as members of academic institutions, what strategies might we employ within our research questions, data collection, collaborations, and dissemination that seek to earn trust? Our responses to these questions provide insight into who is invited to the table and who remains excluded.
Benjamin’s viral justice framework further calls us as educators on issues of race and racism to reflect on our pedagogical practices within the classroom. As a Black feminist sociologist who teaches on topics of gender, race, and violence, my lectures, discussion, and small-group activities are often devoted to diagnosing and analyzing social problems within the carceral state. While reviewing Benjamin’s book, one student rightfully asked why we spent so much time discussing the problem—be it the forced sterilization of women in California prisons or the criminalization of Black intimate partner violence survivors—and not effective policies that ameliorate racialized and gendered state violence. And while this student’s comment was directed at the impact of macro-level legal reforms, they posed the same question Ruha Benjamin answers throughout her book: what are other people doing to combat racial (and other systems of) injustice and how can we as a collective be a part of long-term transformation?
Using Viral Justice as a model, I have since begun to incorporate the everyday actions of individuals and organizations into our classroom activities. We don’t simply study the violence of the carceral state—we also explore restorative and transformative justice by learning about organizations such as Common Justice, Still She Rises, INCITE!, and Survived & Punished to understand how various community stakeholders have developed alternatives to the current criminal punishment system. Further in line with Benjamin’s framework, we spend more time discussing how we might design a world that not only adequately responds to the needs of racially marginalized communities but also seeks to dismantle the structural conditions that reproduce their marginalization. By structuring our class discussions around world-building, my students and I learn more about national, local, and youth-led organizations committed to sustaining life-affirming institutions that support survivors of violence. While I have applied these insights to understanding alternative forms of justice to the carceral state, I encourage educators across all subject matters to incorporate Benjamin’s Viral Justice framework in the classroom. These lessons ultimately provide students with a toolkit to reimagine justice and redistribute power in their own communities little by little.
