Ranita Ray - "Slow Violence" - Reuben Miller

Ranita Ray will discuss her new book Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom. She will be joined in conversation by Reuben Miller. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE 

About the Book: 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.

In SLOW VIOLENCE: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom (St. Martin’s Press / On sale: August 5, 2025), Ray 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, SLOW VIOLENCE 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.

About the Author: RANITA RAY is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico, where she holds an endowed chair. She is a 2019 National Academy of Education/Spencer fellow, as well as a 2018 Racial Democracy and Criminal Justice Network fellow, and has been featured in Slate, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. Ray's first book, The Making of a Teenage Service Class, won four prizes and Slow Violence was shortlisted for the 2024 Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize. Her TedX Talk is widely used by educators.

About the Interlocutor: Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. He was named a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Prior to joining the Crown Family School, Dr. Miller was an Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan where he served as a Faculty Associate in the Population Studies Center and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Afro American and African Studies. His work has been published in journals of criminology, human rights, law, psychology, sociology, social work and public health and he is frequently called upon to offer commentary on issues of crime, punishment, racism and poverty. It has been funded by federal agencies and philanthropic foundations ranging from HUD and NIH to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Miller was selected as a Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (2016-17), a visiting scholar at Dartmouth University (2018) and at the University of Texas at Austin (2019), and an Eric and Wendy Schmidt National Fellow at the New America (2019). In 2021, he was selected for an academic writing residency by the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy.

A native son of Chicago’s Southside, Dr. Miller received his Ph.D from Loyola University Chicago, an AM from the University of Chicago, and a BA from Chicago State University.