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.