ELENA VALDEZ: ATTENDING RUHA BENJAMIN'S SCINTILATING DISCUSSION
Ever since I first watched her commencement speech in 2024, I have been intrigued by the work of Dr. Ruha Benjamin. I have long resonated with her non-conformist spirit, especially as a high schooler who felt like I didn't fit into the archetypal woman the way my white peers did. Something that Dr. Benjamin said at the beginning of her speech that “social justice always starts with a question”. As I began to think about the infinite questions I had in my mind, I realized that the path to achieving social justice is not unidirectional, but rather prismatic. Its protean.This set the tone for the rest of her talk.
Although it is clear that Benjamin is not suggesting that original and critical thinking is the panacea of the issues that currently plague our society, she is offering an entirely different framework for interpreting and critiquing mainstream narratives that seek to dominate society in a colonizing fashion. I experienced this myself when she unabashedly tells the audience to reject the notions that the capitalist bourgeoisie promote as being “products of a changing society”.
Dr. Benjamin goes on to say that there are unlimited pathways to harm, and all we have to do is pick a pathway. This made me think about the importance of being aware and percipient of these pathways and being intentional about which pathway you choose to combat in order to effectuate change. Dr. Benjamin brings up a fascinating example of creativity tests given to five year-olds, ten year olds, teenagers, and adults. Surprisingly, five year olds passed with close to 100%, while adults were around 2%. I think this example is so exemplary of the ways in which education evolved to produce standardized, conformist thinkers to make up a compliant society. As Dr. Benjamin put it, fascism thrives under silence. Despite this, I still believe that education can also allow for so much development of one's intellect. After all, it is thanks to Spelman that I was able to attend this talk with Dr. Benjamin. I think Dr. Benjamin’s overarching argument is that students must seek an education while being aware and critical of what is being taught, and therefore make concerted efforts to maintain their own creativity and individuality. Furthermore, I often think about institutionalized education as a path to self liberation for black people, but specifically self liberation in the aggregate. I find that education alone is inadequate to self liberation, but must be paired with political discourse, conversation, study of the arts, community, execution. At the book signing, I had the privilege of asking her a question: how do she think we as spelman students can go about facilitating our own multifaceted approaches to education, especially in preparation to go on to other institutions where we are the minority? Dr. Benjamin, as expected, gave me a very astute response. She highlighted the importance of having one foot inside the world of your university and one foot outside. She exemplifies the importance of not only
learning inside your institution, but also developing your intellect in a real-world manner. To me, Dr. Benjamin's response is exemplary of her indomitable character, one that could not be contained by the Spelman's gates.
I also found that this directly connected to something she mentioned in her talk about asking for the support of one of her fellow black female colleagues in case she was fired from her position at Princeton concerning her stance on the conflict in the West Bank. If you’re pursuing change, you must be willing to die for your cause. I think this connects directly to the substance of Dr. Benjamin’s talk, because it exemplifies her recusant personality through her commitment to the causes that she believes in. Overall, I find Dr. Benjamin infinitely fascinating, intelligent, bold and one of the fiercest intellectuals I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.
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