Slow Violence
Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Black and brown children in America's schools are routinely subjected to demeaning treatment by teachers, according to this alarming exposé from sociologist Ray (The Making of a Teenage Service Class). In 2017, Ray embedded in a fourth grade classroom in Las Vegas, intending to study the effects of budget cuts. Instead, her observations became focused on how teachers were humiliating and mocking students on a regular basis. This "slow violence" stemmed, according to Ray, from a dehumanizing indifference to Black and brown students' unique situations and needs. Examples include Nagli, a "talkative and enthusiastic" Black student whose baby brother died, sending her into a spiral of grief completely ignored by her teachers; Reggie, another devoted Black student, who was treated by teachers like a "predator" after they caught him looking at pornographic photos on his iPad; and Miguel, a "distracted" Latino student whom teachers kept incorrectly calling autistic. Each student was subjected to mockery and beratement from teachers rather than any sustained attempt to connect or correct. The mostly white teachers range from one who expressed a desire for a "white history month" to others who seem genuinely "tolerant" but still, in Ray's unsettling assessment, don't seem to perceive students of color as "full humans." This adds to the chorus of provocative recent studies positing that majority-white environments negatively impact students of color.
