Forthcoming

A powerful exposé of the American public education system's indifference toward marginalized children and the "slow violence" that fashions schools into hostile work and learning environments.

In 2017, sociologist Ranita Ray stepped inside a fourth-grade classroom in one of the nation’s largest majority-minority districts in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was there to conduct research on the lack of resources and budget cuts that regularly face public schools. However, a few months into her immersion, a disturbed Ray recognized that that greatest impediment to students was the “slow violence” that preys on their minds, bodies, and spirits at the hands of teachers and administrators who are charged with their care.

Slow Violence lays bare the routine indifference, racism, and verbal and emotional abuse and harassment that teachers and administrators perpetrate routinely against the most vulnerable children in our schools. We meet Nazli, a bright, funny Black girl, and math wiz, who loses her baby sister, and is told that “grit” will enable her to rise above her grief. Elias is a devoted student and curious scholar, but his path to success is derailed when teachers fashion him as a predator after they find him looking at two inappropriate photos on his iPad. There’s Tala, a shy and determined Filipina who has just arrived in the US, but is ignored based on her educator’s assumption that “Asians” are “good at math.” Her entire journey through school is darkened by this stereotype. And there’s Miguel, a sharp, distracted Latino boy who can’t overcome his teachers’ urge to incorrectly diagnose him with autism.

Bolstered by an empathetic and passionate voice as well as the latest breaking research in the social sciences, Ray goes beyond timeworn discussions about the school-to-prison pipeline, funding, and achievement gaps to directly address what happens behind the closed doors of classrooms, introducing a compelling—and crucial—new perspective into the conversation about our education system.

In the warm, luminous spirit of character-driven books like Invisible Child, Slow Violence allows us to see that the way we’ve tried to make a start in education reform is wrong. To forge new approaches that foster young minds and flourishing generations we have to start with how children experience the classroom. Unflinchingly, Slow Violence tells us—and shows us where to begin.

Winner of the 2018 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Winner of the 2020 Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Pacific Sociological Association

Honorable Mention, 2019 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Section on Race, Gender, and Class 

Finalist, 2020. Bourdieu Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Section on the Sociology of Education

In this book Ray challenges common wisdom that focusing on "risk behaviors" such as drug use, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood is the key to ameliorating poverty in Black and brown communities. Instead, she shows how this strategy unleashes racialized class violence on Black and brown youth. Ray recounts the three years she spent with sixteen economically marginalized young Black and brown people, documenting their struggles to balance school and work while keeping commitments to family, friends, and lovers. Hunger, homelessness, untreated illnesses, and long hours spent traveling between work, school, and home disrupted their dreams of upward mobility. While families, schools, nonprofit organizations, academics, and policy makers stress risk behaviors in their efforts to end the cycle of racialized poverty, Ray argues that this strategy is itself racist and reproduces racialized class hierarchies.