Ranita Ray

Associate Professor

Baca Zinn Professor of Sociology

Email:: ranitaray@unm.edu
Office:: SSCI 1062
Website

Curriculum vitae

Education

Sociology, University of Connecticut (2013)

Research Interests

Race and Ethnicity, Education, Gender, Inequality

Children and Youth

Books:

Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom

Ranita Ray

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 brother, and is told that “grit” will enable her to rise above her grief. Reggie 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 Nalin, 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.

The Making of a Teenage Service Class

Ranita Ray

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.

Available for purchase here.

Recent/Select Publications:

Ray, Ranita. 2023. “Race-Conscious Racism: Alibis for Racial Harm in the Classroom.” Social Problems 70 (3): 682–697.

Ray, Ranita. 2022. “School as a Hostile Institution: How Black and Immigrant Girls of Color Experience the Classroom." Gender & Society 36(1): 88-111.

2023 American Sociological Association, The Section on the Sociology of Sex and Gender’s Distinguished Article Award.
2023 Society for the Study of Social Problems, Arlene Kaplan Daniels Paper Award.
2023 American Sociological Association, The Section on Race, Gender, and Class’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Article Award. Honorable Mention.

Ray, Ranita. 2022. It Never Seems to Be a Good Time to Talk About Teachers’ Racism Educators are under siege for teaching “CRT.” But curriculum isn’t everything. Slate. March 1st

Ray, Ranita and Korey Tillman. 2019. “Envisioning a Feminist Urban Ethnography: Structure, Culture, and New Directions in Poverty Studies,” Sociology Compass 13(1): 1-10

Ray, Ranita. 2018. “’Identity of Distance’: How Economically Marginalized Black and Latina Women Navigate Risk Discourse and Employ Feminist Ideals,” Social Problems 65(4): 456–472.

2019 American Sociological Association Race, Gender, and Class Section Best Article Award.
2020 Society for the Study of Social Problems, Arlene Kaplan Daniels Paper Award Honorable Mention.

Courses:

Reproductive Justice

Sociological Theory

Social Inequality and Power

Ethnography