The New Jim Code

MacArthur Genius Ruha Benjamin gets $800k for coining the term "the New Jim Code" to warn of the racist robot menace.

Is the Age of Woke over? If so, somebody forgot to tell the MacArthur Foundation because this year’s “genius grants” seem exactly the same as ten years ago.

The MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” of $800,000 usually go to a few white guys doing hard work at the frontiers of science (e.g., new winner Joseph Parker, a Caltech evolutionary biologist, or Benjamin Van Mooy, a Woods Hole oceanographer) and to a whole lot of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ types (but often much gayer), for complaining about how oppressed their group is and how representatives of their group, such as, say, themselves, deserve more money (such as $800,000 Genius Grants). Often, glitter and words like “postcolonial,” “imagine,” “interrogate,” and “joy” are involved, such as with Ebony G. Patterson:

In early works, such as the “Gangstas for Life” series (initiated in 2008), Patterson explores ostentatious adornment—“bling”—as a strategy employed by working-class people to attain visibility.

Are people who brag of being “Gangstas for Life” truly “working-class people?” Wouldn’t Marx scorn them as the lumpenproletariat?

She establishes dress as a tool of empowerment for those thought to be socially and economically powerless in postcolonial spaces. Patterson incorporates hand-cut paper, gouache, glitter, and mixed media elements in these works, giving them a tactility that encourages viewers to linger over their surfaces and establishes an intimacy between viewer and subjects. … In more recent works, Patterson employs the garden as a site of power to examine loss in the context of the colonial past and to imagine a restorative future.

A very large fraction of the 2024 Geniuses demand more money and power for their identity groups, as I recount in detail below the paywall: