"In Slow Violence, Ranita Ray manages to artfully and intellectually destroy the casual deployment of classroom "microaggressions" and "benevolent racism" opting instead to situate the brutality of our classrooms as slow, absolutely destructive violence. The book is a blending of what's possible when tenacious genius cultural workers take our educational past and future seriously."
—Kiese Laymon, Author of Heavy: An American Memoir

"At a moment when diversity, equity and inclusion are under attack and re-segregation is underway in American institutions, Ranita Ray’s urgently needed book critically examines an overworked, majority white teaching force from a rarely heard perspective: that of the majority non-white school children who fill America's (sometimes windowless) classrooms. With pathos, care, and the righteous fury its subject deserves, Slow Violence will move readers to tears and, hopefully, to action."
—Steven W. Thrasher, author, The Viral Underclass and former education reporter for the Village Voice

"A beautiful and aching book—at once a careful meditation on the hope we find in the eyes of our nation’s most vulnerable children, and a searing indictment of our failure to recognize their humanity...Ray shows us, in masterful strokes and through the eyes of children she followed, that teaching is a job, and that teachers are people who bring their gifts and biases into the classroom. [It] will change how you think about education."
—Reuben Jonathan Miller, author of Halfway Home

"Gripping and powerful...Ray's clear-eyed and full-hearted analysis shows how the precarity of public education—particularly in communities marginalized by systemic racism and economic injustice—can push teachers to punch down on kids and parents who are even more powerless than they are.”
—Jessica Calarco, author of Holding It Together