Abstract
“Schools dehumanize children,” writes Ranita Ray (p. 98). Indeed, in Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom, she makes a compelling case that they do. In referring to “slow violence,” she means the psychological and emotional violence that teachers impose on children through their “cruelty, harassment, and negligence,” not physical or sexual violence (p. x). Through rich ethnographic profiles of students and teachers in a Las Vegas school she calls Ribbon Grass Elementary, Ray exposes the gradual, invisible, and often contradictory forms this violence takes. By bringing to light the normalized dehumanization of children in schools, Ray does the important work of challenging cultural myths about teachers as selfless heroes.
To be clear, Ray is attentive to teachers’ dedication to their work and their care for students, as well as the poor pay and working conditions they face. Undoubtedly, there are public school teachers in the United States who pursue this line of work because they care deeply about children. Others, including those Ray followed, are primarily motivated by the job security and predictable pay of teaching. She reminds us that teachers are “ordinary people for whom [teaching] is a job, a means to make ends meet” (p. 6). Moreover, the pity-rooted form of care that many teachers display can ultimately harm the children in their charge. For example, Ray depicts a group of white women teachers who have received extensive training in culturally responsive pedagogy. What they take from this training is that their predominantly Black and brown students come from broken homes and chaotic environments, and that the children must use grit to overcome the “bad path” they are destined for (p. 83). These teachers see themselves as uniquely positioned to save their students from the tragedies that their home lives will inevitably lead them toward. Ray thus reveals “how pedagogies meant to center students’ histories and cultures as sources of strength can be mobilized to harass them inside schools” (p. 86).
Ray implores readers to recognize that high-profile incidents of teachers harassing students, for example by using racial slurs or donning inappropriate cultural attire, are not exceptional. Rather, she argues that they are reflective of normalized dynamics in schools, in which teachers demean students routinely. Demonstrating the incessant psychological damage that teachers inflict on students challenges the predominant narrative on the American left that teachers are “altruistic, self-sacrificing, benevolent people” (p. 5). In Ray’s view, recognizing that teachers are ordinary people who pursue teaching as a job to make ends meet is necessary to gain a more complete—more critical—perspective of their work.
Although her argument primarily concerns teachers’ behaviors, her main concern is how those behaviors affect students’ experiences in school. Ray brings our attention to how very difficult it is to be a young person in school, especially one filled with teachers who disparage students’ cultures and families. Children are blamed for innocent mistakes, like leaving a pair of glasses at home, or for errors that are not even their own, like a parent not returning a phone call. They are expected to control natural urges such as the need to urinate or satisfy hunger and are mocked or ignored if they struggle to do so. They are judged for how many siblings they have, whether their homework appears to be completed with or without adult help, and whether they discuss changes in their living arrangements. Importantly, Ray emphasizes the “unpredictability and inconsistency of teachers’ responses,” which contribute to the discomfort students face in figuring out how to navigate school (p. 18). Part of the unfairness they must endure is that they cannot even reliably anticipate what will receive teachers’ praise and what will receive their scorn.
Ethnography is necessary to unpack a phenomenon like slow violence, given its cumulative nature. Ray’s vignettes show how teachers’ eye rolls, sarcasm, and subtle jabs wear against students’ enthusiasm to learn and be in community with one another. She writes that “slow violence is the form of non-spectacular everyday happenings that only make sense if you coalesce and collect them into a narrative and look at their long-term impact” (p. 262). That is the work she has done in this book. Although some of the narrative threads she weaves feel cut short, as her fieldwork ends with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this abruptness matches the suddenness with which the central relationships of the text came to an end. Months-long battles between teachers and their students simply vanished as students were sent home to shelter in place.
In this text, Ray positions schools as institutions that are “incapable of recognizing children’s humanity” (p. 5), while she is deeply attentive to children’s humanity. She carefully documents their fear, humiliation, wit, hope, and joy. I found this book to be a breath of fresh air in a field that often positions children as future adults—not yet whole people in their own right. Ray’s close ethnographic perspective brings the reader into the classroom with attention to how children see one another and the teachers they expect to protect them. How does one student go from being a teacher’s favorite one week to being shunned the next? How does another student respond when a teacher who used to ignore them suddenly focuses intently on their behavior? The shifts are often subtle, and Ray masterfully documents them throughout the book.
Slow Violence is arranged both chronologically, following students from fourth to sixth grade, and relationally, with chapter titles like “Ms. Johnson and Reggie,” “Nazli and Ms. Mack,” and “Ms. Johnson and her Principal.” Through the chapters, the reader comes to see the complex web of relationships that shape and reshape classroom dynamics. Ray’s rich profiles highlight the “canyon of a power divide” between students and teachers (p. 5), a divide that is heightened in contexts with racial dynamics like Ribbon Grass Elementary, which features mostly white teachers and mostly Black and brown students. Such dynamics are a common feature of public schools today, and it is important for scholars to recognize how they influence the power imbalance between students and teachers.
Ultimately, Ray invites readers to imagine what schools might look like if they sought to promote students’ joy, curiosity, and pleasure, as opposed to the status quo emphasis on “academic achievement and disciplined bodies” (p. 267). She recognizes that the current normative structure of schooling in the United States rewards compliance, not the development of “robust political imaginations” or “emotional health” (p. 267). Control dominates the logic of schooling, reshaping the exuberance of youth to fit the supposed docility of learning. A central idea for Ray is that sociologists of education must “insist on a more honest conversation about the stark power differential between teachers and students” (p. 265). Ray notes that because of cultural beliefs in teachers’ inherent altruism, we overlook the slow violence they inflict upon students. Instead, she calls on readers to recognize the “duality” of teachers’ “kindness and hard work side by side with [their] tremendous cruelty” (p. 106). It is difficult to document teachers’ inhumanity toward children in light of the deeply unfair working conditions they face and conservative cultural narratives that villainize them—but Ray reminds us that it is our duty to do so for the children upon whom they enact this slow violence.