Slow Violence

”[An] alarming exposé … This adds to the chorus of provocative recent studies positing that majority-white environments negatively impact students of color.” –Publishers Weekly

“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

RANITA RAY is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico, where she holds an endowed chair. For 15 years, her research program has centered on youth, education, and gender and racial injustice. Ray is a 2019 National Academy of Education/Spencer fellow, as well as a 2018 Racial Democracy and Criminal Justice Network fellow. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation several times, including in 2018 when her team was awarded a large grant to study urban inequalities in Las Vegas. Slate, The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Las Vegas Review Journal, Las Vegas Sun, and the Las Vegas Weekly have featured Ray’s research and original writing. She is author of The Making of a Teenage Service Class, which won four prizes and is widely adopted for classroom use. In addition, Ray’s TED talk is often used by educators. And, Slow Violence was shortlisted for the 2024 Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize.