RICH BENJAMIN is an American cultural critic, anthropologist, and author. Benjamin is perhaps best known for the non-fiction book Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. He is also a lecturer and a public intellectual, who has discussed issues on NPR, PBS, CNN and MSNBC. His writing appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian and The New York Review of Books.
His maternal grandfather, Pierre-Eustache Daniel Fignolé, was a Haitian politician who became Haiti's provisional head of state for three weeks in 1957. He was one of the most influential leaders in the pre-Duvalier era.
Benjamin's work focuses on US politics and culture, democracy, money, high finance, class, Blacks, Whites, Latinos, public policy, global cultural transformation, and demographic change. He has been contributing essays to The New Yorker since 2017.
Benjamin's book, Searching for Whitopia, was the subject of a TED Talk that has been viewed more than 2.8 million times. The book has received coverage on NPR and MSNBC. In 2021 Benjamin delivered the Poynter Lecture at Yale Law School on "conservatism and Trumpism in the era of digital media—on how right-wing ideology, white fear, and the digital media ecosystem threaten democracy in America."
He has presented his research on money, blockchain, and decentralization at a conference on technology. In 2021, he served as a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Benjamin was in Princeton, NJ in 2023 for his research and teaching post as the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University.
In 2023-2024, Benjamin served as a Harvard-Radcliffe Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. There he continued research on his major field of interest, high finance—the social-scientific dimensions of quants, flash trading, hedge funds, extreme wealth, and risk.
His new memoir "Talk To Me," details his family's story, including that of his grandfather who was ousted in a coup in 1957.
