In her book Slow Violence published last year, the sociologist Ranita Ray explained and explored her ethnographic study of the US education system. Beginning in 2017 and continuing until the COVID shutdown, her research was done in Las Vegas, Nevada. She observed classrooms in one of the country’s largest minority-majority school districts, but where most of the teachers are white.

It’s the kind of work I seek out.

It’s a scathing leftist critique of a dominant system that is part of larger problems in society. But also, it combines the personal with the objective and analytical, the scientific and scholarly. In writing about it, she refused a posture of academic neutrality by, instead, taking a strong position of righteous judgment toward unfair cruelty, social injustice, and collective failure.

I also appreciated how she talked about health. It went beyond physical, emotional, and psychological health.

She also referred to ‘political health’. And in relation to ‘political consciousness’, she spoke of ‘political well-being’. I like that way of putting it, as it properly radicalizes what is at stake. Such strong language may only be sprinkled throughout the text, but it stood out in my reading. While political health resonates with public health, it further points to the issues of power, specifically power that is held over others versus being empowered in oneself and holding mutual power.

Political health, without a doubt, is a fundamental and foundational requirement of democracy, of a free people. So, it’s no minor issue.

If public school teachers may not think of themselves as powerful, they are in relation to the children in their charge. The problem might be the very fact that teachers generally feel so powerless, in being employed within a dysfunctional bureaucracy where they have so little autonomy and self-determination, not to mention little respect in the larger society. Their only direct authority is over the students in their classrooms, and so those children could become the easy target of their frustration.

Giving Ray’s work an additional edge, she has a personal stake in the very structural and institutional prejudices she describes. She sees herself in the children she came to know.

During her childhood in India, her family scraped together just enough money to send her to a government-subsidized, English-based boarding school that was an institutional legacy from British colonialism. If getting a barely adequate formal education at all might’ve made her lucky, the school was so underfunded as to lack teachers for some classes.

Worse still, while there, she experienced what it was like to be stigmatized, denigrated, shamed, and punished for belonging to the lower class Indian culture that didn’t conform to white Western norms and expectations. If different than the US, she was part of an assimilationist project to separate her from her traditional community, to ‘civilize’ and Westernize her (speak proper English, eat with utensils, etc).

One can sense the anger, outrage, and frustration burning just below the surface of the author’s words and, on many occasions, stated outright. In the classes she sat in, she saw the maltreatment and abuse firsthand and, even as an expert already familiar with it all, she came away shocked at how pervasive it was. Plus, she was forced into the moral harm of not only witnessing the tragedy but also, as an academic researcher, in being forbidden to intervene when it was happening before her eyes.

All she could do was watch, take notes, and bide her time. But obviously, she wasn’t a neutral, detached observer.

So, she came to feel guilt about what she worried was her passive complicity in the very system she hoped to criticize and challenge. The book, obviously, was a cathartic experience for her. She finally could speak out, if it was too late for the children she saw hurt years before and who would now be outside the public education system entirely.

As much as it’s a scholarly work, Slow Violence also at times verges on a near jeremiad, and that is meant as a compliment of sorts. We need more people, especially scholars and public intellectuals, willing to speak uncomfortable truths and speak them without quibbling. She is to be commended for having the courage to say what so many didn’t want to hear, hence with much pushback.

But it should be clarified that Ray doesn’t limit herself to mere complaint and protest.

* * *

To demonstrate her left-wing credentials, Ray goes so far as to advocate school abolitionism, with a distinction between schooling and education. However, she only brings it up in her concluding thoughts, as her primary intent is to first and foremost show what’s happening in public schools, to simply wake up the public in recognizing there is a problem at all.

That advocacy indicates strong left-libertarian tendencies, though she never explicitly details her ideological principles and political commitments. This radical proposal, certainly, isn’t in line with right-wing attacks on public schools, as part of fearing an educated citizenry — liberal-minded and liberated — that might demand real democracy. She leans in the opposite direction. In her view, it’s akin to the prison abolitionist movement that itself took inspiration from the success of slave abolition.

If it’s not clear how seriously she takes this radical vision, the point is that we should feel compelled to have a moral reckoning about the history of schooling that has formed into present realities. In acknowledging the problems of how schooling is actually practiced, we should come to terms with how far that diverges from democratic aspirations, in how public education is conceived and perceived in the public imaginary. Then we can publicly debate the possibilities of what could take its place, or else how it could be reformed.

It’s necessary to survey the origins of public education in the US. It’s a history few are ever taught, in public or private schools. (This wasn’t a focus of Ray’s book either.)

Early 20th century Progressivism was often led by paternalistic right-wingers. One well known advocate was Theodore Roosevelt, an avowed elitist, racist, misogynist, conservative, fundamentalist, and imperialist. The movement to create universal education was once the darling of socially conservative right-wingers, specifically WASPS who were nativists and ethnonationalists, sometimes also white supremacists, eugenicists, and fascists.

In the moral panic of the late 1800s to early 1900s, right-wingers feared and hated the multicultural hordes of ethnic populations (i.e., hyphenated Americans) that flooded in as waves of immigrants and that formed into ethnic enclaves. Specifically, their animosity and prejudice was directed at: Catholics and Jews; Mexicans, Irish, Italians, Germans, and Eastern Europeans. These other ethnicities were sometimes deemed as non-white or as questionable in their whiteness, certainly not of the good sort.

These ethnics were perceived as unAmerican and, possibly, an enemy within. It was assumed they had greater loyalty to their ancestral homelands, their ethnic communities, and their traditional religions. There was particular paranoia about the Pope’s authority, as if the Vatican conspired to take over the US; an old conspiracy theory that went back to the country’s founding.

Those ties of traditional social order needed to be broken to make the ethnics into real Americans. It also helped weaken regional identities in creating a common American identification with the nation-state, as part of the modernizing process. Along with many other means, the Pledge of Allegiance required in schools was used to this end. Schooling was largely about citizen-making, as part of the Melting Pot.

Similar to the reservation school system, public education was intended to enforce assimilation by taking children out of their homes and communities. Public schools sought to compete with and replace private schools run by ethnic groups, as well as by the Catholic Church and other religions. The purpose was to eliminate ethnic identity and autonomy. This was the same period of English-only laws that forbade speaking and writing non-English languages in any official manner, especially in schools.

Then in the world war period and into the early Cold War, propaganda was actively part of the curriculum in the education system, combined with America studies at the college level. That legacy continues in the present education system that is a sanitized pedagogy serving the elite interests of the American Empire.

Another early stated purpose of public schools was to prepare children for the workforce in industrialized capitalism. So, it was also meant to indoctrinate and interpellate the youngest generation into capitalist realism, as rural communities and extended families were dissolved during mass urbanization. This was particularly important as many rural Americans and rural European immigrants had, up to that point, still been living in partly pre-capitalist economies, with lingering traditional cultures and carryovers from the Ancien Regime.

It’s surprising how long it took capitalism to fully take over by eliminating all that came before it.

Even into the early post-war period of the mid-20th century, some rural communities continued to operate based on kin networks, subsistence farming, access to resources on the commons (hunting, trapping, fishing), and a barter economy. Having been born in 1946 with his formative early years in the 1950s, the West Virginian Joe Bageant described this still existing pre-capitalism in his memoir, Rainbow Pie. His family literally lived off the land.

[For the longer historical context, in the United Kingdom, the last remnants of the Charter of the Forests (1217) wasn’t fully eliminated until the neoliberal-neocon revolution. That charter protected the commons for public use by the propertyless commoners (i.e., economic rights of the working class). It’s one of the most radical documents ever written, and some consider it to be a foundation of the US Constitution (Guy Standing, Why You’ve Never Heard of a Charter That’s as Important as the Magna Carta). Its final repeal happened in 1971 (same year as the Powell Memo), slightly over a half century ago and so well within living memory.]

During the Cold War, the public education system was revamped to better serve industrialized capitalism and the military-industrial complex, so as to better compete against the Soviet commies. That was when started the takeover of STEM education. With most ethnic cultures and communities destroyed at that point, and with immigration intentionally suppressed, schools could even more intensely focus on churning out subjugated worker-citizens for a modern economy in service to big biz.

So, it’s not only the failure of schooling, as related to democratic education and social justice, but also its ‘success’ toward ends we might deem questionable. To know how to fix education, we’d first have to agree about its legitimate reason for existing at all.

To Ray’s mind, the purpose of education isn’t merely intellectual achievement, to be ascertained by standardized testing, and to be rewarded with good grades, with any failing to be punished. And definitely she isn’t hoping for proper assimilation, be it as patriotic citizens or obedient workers. Instead, she envisions an education system that promotes health and happiness, even pleasure and joy, but certainly one that empowers students to take control of their own education.

Once again, it’s personal for her.

Since finishing her research, she has been looking into schools for her own child (Finding a Joyful School). She wants a space where curiosity, creativity, and play can flourish. Basically, if she doesn’t state it exactly this way, what she considers to be the ultimate goal is to induce open-mindedness and liberal-mindedness. That’s to say greater expression of the dual personality trait of ‘openness to experience’ and ‘intellect’ (FFM), which only happens under healthy, low-stress conditions.

The point is to support children in exploring and developing their fullest potential, with as much freedom and opportunity as is possible. Education systems and institutions should serve children, as part of serving the public good. If one is opposed to the total abolition of schools, then achieving that end is the most basic requirement to be met to prove their legitimacy and justify their continuance.

To have a free society, we’ll need an education system that supports and promotes freedom. Democracy has to be instilled from childhood onward. That would be the main point of departure from public schools as they function now. We the citizenry can tolerate nothing less.

* * *

Notwithstanding my praise of Slow Violence, there were some oversights and missed opportunities.

First off, Ray attempts a delicate balance of empathic concern for both sides of the equation. If her ultimate sympathy and allegiance is to the children she followed for years and came to care for, she also recognizes how difficult and troubled is the teaching profession. Teachers are underpaid and overworked, with expectations placed upon them that are unrealistic and unfair. As she advocates for students, she also advocates for teachers and better teaching conditions — it’s all of the same package.

Yet she rightly sees that as no excuse for the bigotry, cruelty, and ignorance among many teachers that is casually practiced and has become socially normalized, or else unrecognized and unacknowledged. That is why she correctly refers to it as slow violence, a concept more often used in environmental studies (e.g., childhood lead toxicity) and health studies (e.g., shit life syndrome).

She is correct to apply it to public education, from the perspective of social science.

Such slow violence is inseparable from structural, systemic violence. The schools themselves, as public institutions, are part of the problem. But of course, it’s about the communities and entire society that forms the larger context of lived experience. The sad part is that the public schools meant to be a respite and saving grace for these children more often than not contribute to their hardships. And too many teachers are part of the problem.

The missed opportunity in the book, though, is precisely that the author didn’t delve into what’s done to psyche, identity, and behavior under severe, chronic stress that so easily causes trauma and forms into PTSD, as part of victimization cycle. Calling it ‘toxic stress’ in The Deepest Well, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris shows how it relates to all aspects of health. American schools don’t represent healthy conditions for anyone involved.

Everyone is worse for it, and to an extreme degree.

It’s related to how high inequality causes problems not only for the poor but likewise for the economically well off (Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder). As the students are harmed, and as Ray was impacted by moral harm, so the same happens to many working within schools. It’s easy to forget how victimization perpetuates itself, with many of the victims becoming victimizers in turn. That is to say teachers aren’t protected from the stress, trauma, and oppression; especially as they’re products of the same schooling from their own early lives.

Teachers don’t stand above the fray but, rather, find themselves on the frontlines; and with little preparation for how to deal with any of it, much less the resources and support. What meager and superficial training they get for racism, abuse, etc is far from adequate. And if they step out of line once, if anything goes wrong, it’s the teacher who will be scapegoated with almost no one to step in for their defense.

Teaching in public schools is one of the hardest jobs in the world, and with little worthy compensation for all the hard work and heartache.

In addition, keep in mind that it’s not only the power differential and dynamic that creates an imbalance between teachers — mostly white, US-born, cisgender, able-bodied, and neurotypical — and their underprivileged students. A society like this is completely defined by high inequality, dominance hierarchy, and social Darwinism. The power disparities are found in all areas. Teachers too are disempowered by those who hold power above them in controlling the education system: administrators, school boards, PTAs, legislators, lobbyists, etc.

They are barely above the bottom of society. Many teachers don’t make enough money to meet their needs and so have to work second jobs or else, in some cases, live out of their vehicles. That economic insecurity or even outright desperation, for many, is layered upon physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. Those who end up in teaching often have few other good options for, if nothing else, it’s a steady paycheck with basic benefits like healthcare.

Ray does understand this to a large extent and talks about it on multiple occasions. But I’m not sure she fully appreciates the significance of it, in what it does to the mind.

Yes, going by her account, most of the teachers she met had internalized problematic attitudes. Prejudice is as rampant in schools as it is in the society at large. As she points out, teachers are normal people and white teachers, specifically, are unfortunately representative of the average white American. I have no problem with her no-holds-barred condemnation of teachers who are plain bigots or who otherwise spread problematic views and fail to do right by their students.

But she doesn’t explore what shaped those people in the first place. Many teachers have been under extreme pressure for years, some for decades. It takes a toll as a deranging and corrupting force. Even if they had begun teaching as good liberals with the best of intentions, the entire system will wear people down and bring out the worse in them.

* * *

Social liberalism and liberal-mindedness has a tough time surviving the onslaught of illiberal forces (Paul R. Nail, et al, Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives). I’ve often referred to a number of specific examples in social science research.

As a clear demonstration, liberals who first learned of the 9/11 terrorist attack on television, in repeatedly viewing the violent footage played on a loop, were more likely to later support right-wing policies: Patriot Act, Homeland Security, expanded police powers, restrictions on civil liberties, etc (Dietram A. Scheufele, et al, September 11 News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Support for Civil Liberties). That’s an example of mean world syndrome, as explained by cultivation theory.

[As a side note, all of the the corporate MSM jointly and systematically having beaten the war drums, while pushing violent imagery and fear-mongering rhetoric, shifted public opinion from majority opposition to majority support toward the Iraq War. As part of mediated social construction of conflict (e.g., false reporting of non-existent WMDs) and as part of political spectacle, it took a lot of media-provoked-and-promoted stress and trauma to elicit greater illiberal and authoritarian compliance (Douglas Kellner, 9/11, spectacles of terror, and media manipulation). The so-called War On Terror was a War Of Terror on the American public mind.]

On a more basic level, simply getting liberals mildly inebriated increases conservative-style thinking of stereotypes, and the more drunk people get the more they express conservative views (Scott Eidelman, et al, Low-effort thought promotes political conservatism). Basically, as cognitive load and cognitive complexity was compromised, the liberal-minded fell back on simplifying heuristics. That would make them prone to prejudice and bigotry. If only temporarily, they became right-wingers.

As that shows, the kinds of stress that induce conservative-mindedness can be rather minor.

Other studies have found that, for judges, an uncomfortable chair or being hungry (and low blood-sugar) before lunch will cause them to be more punitive with longer sentencing, less likely to give pardons, etc. Now put that back into the context of the chronic, pervasive, and overwhelming stress teachers are under, probably including uncomfortable chairs as the least of it. Why would we be surprised that a dysfunctional system causes antisocial thought, attitudes, views, speech, and behavior?

Stress and trauma become internalized. It alters us at a neurological level. If it lasts long enough, if it remains unresolved and unhealed, it permanently restructures our brains and psyches.

The thing is that few people have the knowledge and awareness to understand how they’re impacted, not that there is much one could do about it when one has no personal control over one’s environment (e.g., work conditions in a dominance hierarchy and authoritarian society). Enculturation, indoctrination, and interpellation into oppressive systems tends to happen unconsciously and incrementally. No one would freely choose such a sad fate.

As a sociologist, Ray should understand better than most. She should know how this happens and so, optimally, she would’ve included it as part of her discussion. Sure, maybe it could be excused or at least explained as outside the scope of her work. Her focus was mainly on the children and how teachers affected them, not on what affected the teachers themselves.

Still, it’s such an important piece of the puzzle, arguably the piece that brings into focus the entire picture.

It was also relevant to the author herself, as we are all in need of intellectual and psychological self-defense. In the moments when she fell into moralizing about white teachers as individuals and as a group, one might interpret that as a stress-induced expression of right-wing mentality. If we are all responsible for what we do, ultimately that is a collective and mutual responsibility. As a fracturing of our common humanity, both identity politics and isolated individuality are dangerous illusions, as abstractions and distractions.

One could sense the reactionary impulse to frame and narratize it all as a Manichaean divide of dominant whites against all others, specifically where white teachers symbolically stand in for the entire ruling system of hegemonic oppression. As such, poor, powerless, and underprivileged whites are excluded, disappeared, and silenced, but also the system itself isn’t prioritized and interrogated to the degree that’s necessary.

How often did Ray ignore a troubling incident involving a poor white child because it didn’t fit the frameworking of her study?

What gets lost in it all is that the real divide is between the elite and everyone else, between the elite-controlled system and everyone caught in it. Turning whites and non-whites against one another is as unhelpful as doing the same for teachers and students. This plays into divide-and-conquer. Ray herself experienced the negative consequences of this false and counterproductive framing in how many people felt defensive when she spoke of it, in wrongly taking her critique as an attack.

Her take on it at times, if unintentionally, came too close to the gravity pull of a right-wing portrayal of group competition, us vs them. Genuine liberal-minded thinking can get suppressed and compromised without our realizing it. But fortunately, the author was partly able to pull back from the moralizing temptation. If she failed to offer a full class analysis, she did slightly acknowledge economic issues. For instance, it’s good she mentions that teacher pay is too low, but the stressors of our absolutely effed up society go far far far beyond that.

More likely than not, she understands that. I get that she was trying her best and the situation might be near impossible. Entrenched problems are hard to talk about and few want to face them or know how to. That’s all the more reason we leftists need to tread carefully, to communicate clearly, to avoid the most common traps of rhetoric and psychology.

If we want to push for left-wing solutions, we’re going to have to be tirelessly consistent and persistent in keeping the focus on the system itself, on the institutions and structures, on the conditions and other shared factors. That is the one and only point of leverage we have, in that it’s the Achille’s heel of right-wing influence and control. We must bear our entire collective strength on that pressure point.

This isn’t to say teachers shouldn’t be challenged and encouraged to question their own role in the system. But ultimately we leftists need to look upon them as prospective allies, as insiders who know the system and could help to change it. That’s all the more important in realizing so many on the left look upon teachers as heroes. If that is a fantasy, it’s nonetheless a genuine liberal ideal and dream about what public education should be.

We need to find a way of honoring the intent, while gently probing its failure.

* * *

That gets us to the other point that felt missing, if understandably.

As Ray maintained primary concern with the students, not the teachers, so she also kept a laser-like focus on what she considered the most disadvantaged students. That’s helpful to zero in on those who have been historically oppressed and disenfranchised, ignored and disregarded. But this might cause losing sight of the bigger picture, the system itself. In how both students and teachers are harmed by the same system and society, so is true of all students, far from limited to only those who are Black, brown, immigrant, trans, or what have you.

Even in writing on her own life, she doesn’t emphasize the socioeconomic class or caste of her family and her community. All we get is some comments that they were of limited means.

To my mind, class war and class prejudice is as important as other systemic problems and biases. The issues she is talking about, obviously, are a non-issue to wealthy minorities, immigrants, girls, LGBTQIA+ individuals, etc. It’s specifically the lack of wealth and privilege that underlies power disparities, that allows those in authority to treat perceived subordinates and inferiors badly without consequence.

What differentiates the teachers and students in her research wasn’t only race and such but also class.

Teachers, as mostly middle class whites (if often barely middle class), wouldn’t feel automatic racial sympathy for and solidarity with poor whites. That would particularly be true in the poorest white communities where the teachers were hired from elsewhere. Few of those white teachers would’ve grown up in the poor white community where they work nor in any other poor white community for that matter.

[It’s not unlike the fact that most teachers being women doesn’t make them any more open to disadvantaged girls in their classrooms, as her own research elsewhere shows (Mary Beth King, Research finds Black, immigrant girls of color face hostile classrooms). Sharing a demographic detail — be it race, gender, or anything else — doesn’t create an automatic link of shared identity, mutual respect, and moral concern.]

Or to consider the opposite scenario, if she had studied Black, brown, and immigrant students in elite private schools, she surely wouldn’t have made the same observations. The parents of those children could pressure the school administration, could sue teachers, or could simply move take their children elsewhere. White teachers, in such schools, would feel compelled to be deferential to those non-white students.

It all comes down to class. It’s just that, in the US, class has always been conflated with much else. The author failed to take that into account and disentangle it.

In the text, references to ‘poverty’ and the ‘poor’ only comes up a handful of times and only in passing. She only once includes the poor when making a list: “poor, Black, Latinx, brown, immigrant, disabled, and indigenous children.” Also, the only time she even mentions the “students’ socioeconomic status” was in reference to the teachers being “acutely aware” of it and having “pitied them” for it. But apparently, other than dismissing such pity as condescension, it didn’t merit even the briefest and most superficial class analysis.

I suppose it simply isn’t her area of expertise. A scholar can’t necessarily incorporate every possible factor and issue. But in it popping up every now and then in her language, she was clearly aware of it being relevant enough to be mentioned, if only in passing.

It plays into the previous point I made about unhealthy conditions, chronic stress, lingering trauma, and moral harm. Arguably, it’s economics that underlies, worsens, and exacerbates all else. It’s not the only thing, but the capitalist order we live in can’t be otherwise understood. It’s the economics that determines every aspect in the lives of children and adults, students and teachers.

* * *

The omission of class analysis is particularly striking as her previous book, The Making of a Teenage Service Class, was about racialized poverty and socioeconomic mobility.

And I would think that someone from India, where socioeconomic status has been historically structured according to caste and historically restructured according to colonial imperialism, would grasp this far better than most. For a long period of time, in fact, India was brutally ruled over by a Western corporation, the British East India Company, and so made to comply with proto-capitalist mercantilism. The Western imprint of economic power and dominance is stark in that country and one would presume she felt the legacy of it in her own childhood.

Then again, maybe it’s for that reason she wouldn’t as easily appreciate what economics means in the American social order. She came to the US as an adult. It’s possible her main American experience has been limited to places of higher education like the University of Connecticut, University of Nevada, and University of New Mexico where the whites she has personally known are mainly middle class professionals, from academics to teachers.

Whether or not she knows it, most poor Americans are white and most welfare recipients are white. Also related, as most prisoners in the US are white, it might be a safe guess to suspect that most children with single parents are white and most children in the school-to-prison pipeline are white too. Specifically about the author’s research, whites likely still represent the largest portion of the poor in US public schools, if that might be shifting or already shifted as a national minority-majority approaches.

All in all, even as minorities and immigrants are disproportionately targeted and harmed, the permanent underclass remains majority white.

I get it. We should be fair by understanding someone’s context of experience. This wouldn’t have stood out to Ray where she did her research in Las Vegas. The poor residing there are mostly non-white. That is likely true in some other states like California, as well as true all across the Southwest and, of course, in the Deep South.

But she would’ve gotten an entirely different view of society if she’d done her research in the rural areas and inner cities of regions elsewhere: Appalachia, Upper South, New England, Midwest, Great Plains, Far West, and Northwest. The poorest counties in the country are in Appalachia, one of the whitest regions in the country. The only area of worse concentrated poverty is the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Here in Iowa, the poorest and most disadvantaged, on average, are definitely on the pale side of the skin color spectrum.

As she knows the poor and immigrant minority perspective, I have some familiarity with poor whites. I went to public schools in the Deep South, that of South Carolina, that were an even mix of races and socioeconomic status, some of it white poverty. And  I’ve also spent time in the rural Upper South, from North Carolina to Kentucky. But most of all, the greatest portion of my life has been here in Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest. This includes my own working class family in Indiana.

One specific example stands out in my mind (Victimization Culture and Lesser Evilism). West Branch is a neighboring town to Iowa City. I’ve known various people who have lived there, in some cases during their early life. One of these is a close friend who is white and experienced the dark side of that town. To be clear, it is racist, likely an old sundown town; as five black families disappeared, in the early 1900s, from one census to another.

My friend saw how minorities were driven out, including a cross-burning on a Black family’s lawn. But any perceived outsiders and pariahs, such as my friend and her family, were also excluded and persecuted. Oddly enough, her parents were even teachers, one in town and the other here in Iowa City. But they were perceived as low class because the family lived in a rundown old building, the location of a former business, by the railroad tracks.

For decades, one of the most respected community leaders was Coach Butch Pederson (Victimization Culture and Lesser Evilism). His reputation was based on bringing the town football victories for the high school team. But working in the school, he also taught classes and my friend sometimes had him as a teacher. In that role, he had another reputation from bullying kids, mostly white kids since it’s an almost entirely white town. My friend, as a neurodivergent, became a target of his sadism and it left her traumatized.

That’s the thing about oppressive societies. They harm everyone on the bottom of society. It gets built into the culture, social order, and institutions (economic, political, educational, etc). Consider areas in the US that had the most concentration of slavery in the past. To this day, these places have some of the greatest inequality, worst poverty, and most distrust, not only for Blacks but also whites (Christine Kenneally, Invisible History of the Human Race; Nicholas Kristof, When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4; & Facing Shared Trauma and Seeking Hope).

This relates to why the Deep South not only has the highest rates of conservatism, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, honor culture (honor concern), fundamentalism, and patriotism — all of them overlapping (O.K. Nop & M.D. Hammond, A meta-analysis and test of the overlap between honor concern, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation) — but also a prevalence of aggression, abuse (child, spousal), bullying, hate crimes, violent crimes, accidents (guns, vehicles, boats, work), drunk driving, learning disabilities, high school dropouts, drug addiction, mental illness, cardiometabolic disease, STDs, teen pregnancies, etc.*

Under bad conditions, everything is bad for everyone, if it hurts some more than others, and so everyone acts badly. But the addiction to power and privilege is so alluring that many are willing to pay the price to maintain such a dysfunctional social order (Costs Must Be Paid: Social Darwinism As Public Good; & Capitalism as Social Control). Or else the oppressiveness of it all shuts down the mind so that they can’t imagine anything else.

The ruling elite there have sought to maintain a dominance hierarchy, that of both racism and classism. They’ve done so by disinvesting in all areas of public good, public welfare, public infrastructure, and public education; especially the latter as the wealthy children are sent to private schools.

My mother worked in public schools in the Deep South, and indeed it was in areas of former mass enslavement. Some of the poor white kids she dealt with were struggling with severe problems, and the schools were in no position to help them in the way and to the degree they needed. As a white woman, similar to most of the teachers in Ray’s research, I don’t know how my mother treated her students. I’m sure she tried do right by them, but it’s also likely she was carrying unconscious prejudices.

The point is disadvantages and underprivileges, oppressions and harm come in many forms. And it varies greatly from one population to another, in how the US is a vast and diverse country or, rather, empire.

* * *

White poverty gets overlooked because it doesn’t always match the stereotype of poverty (or at least not the stereotype that’s become fashionable), as portrayed among the Black and brown populations in the old inner cities and post-industrial metros. Poor whites sometimes can pass as not poor just by dressing slightly better. Indeed, research shows its easier for poor whites to become assimilated into middle class white communities. Yet they might remain poor, and some of the programs and services directed to minorities would be unavailable to poor whites (not to suggest DEI isn’t necessary).

In any case, the average poor white never escapes poverty, never finds their way into the middle class. They tend to get overlooked in the mainstream narrative of middle-to-upper class whites versus poor, underprivileged, and immigrant minorities. But what happens to poor whites is inseparable to what happens to poor non-whites. It’s all the same indifference and depravity that victimizes children before they’ve even had a chance.

As a blind spot for the author of Slow Violence, it might be a byproduct of the author’s higher education and university career.

Notoriously, academics tend to fall into the silo effect, and even told to stay in their lane. There is probably little interdisciplinary dialogue and in-depth research that, with complexity and nuance, specifically combines poor whites with other disadvantaged populations. For various reasons, experts in one field of study tend to not be experts in the other, nor tend to talk to experts in the other.

It’s not a unique problem in this case. I’ve come across plenty of scholarly (and journalistic) writings about poor whites where there is little or no discussion beyond that demographic. It’s the nature of present academia to narrowly focus on a niche area of study. Besides, wide-ranging curiosity and broad knowledge has never been typical, inside or outside academia.

It’s also likely a simple issue of geographic separation.

The worst white poverty and the worst non-white poverty are often concentrated in totally different parts of the country. Typically, to be near one is to not be near the other. A researcher might have to go to greater effort by traveling to multiple areas to see both and/or to find the few parts of the country where the two populations mix, such as in the Deep South.

A similar problem comes with identity politics where the emphasis is on what divides us (demographics, labels, citizenship status, etc), rather than what unites us or potentially might unite us (high inequality, capitalist oppression, economic struggle, labor organizing, etc). We live in a shared society with shared problems. That could inspire a humanistic vision of group consciousness, solidarity, the commons, and the public good. But that will never happen as long as every separate group, in isolation, is focused on its own concerns as being in competition with the concerns of others.

This is how the identity politics of disadvantaged groups plays right into the narrative frame of the identity politics of right-wingers. That is a conflict that the broad left can never win, as our only path of progress is to reframe it. The right-wing will always excel at dominating under divisiveness.

If left-wingers want to start winning again, we’ll have to recruit potential allies.

That’s what the Black Panther’s did with the Rainbow Coalition, under the charismatic and visionary leadership of Fred Hampton. Among others like feminists and AIM, he reached out to the Young Patriots, an organization of Southern poor whites who had moved to Chicago. Hampton didn’t see it as a zero-sum game but as an opportunity to create strength through numbers and solidarity.

Still, for its limitations and shortcomings, Ranita Ray’s Slow Violence is a much needed view into a problem that has gone unappreciated. As she points out, it simply doesn’t fit into any of the conventional narratives, neither on the Right nor the Left. But it’s just one key take among many others. No single area of scholarship will ever show us the full picture, as the amount of problems we face is immense and daunting.

* * *

All text below is taken from Ranita Ray:

It Never Seems to Be a Good Time to Talk About Teachers’ Racism
by Ranita Ray

Teachers like Ms. Connnell have recently been the targets of right-wing attacks for teaching a curriculum on America’s history of racial oppression, colloquially referred to as critical race theory. Many have come to these teachers’ defense, pointing out the necessity of including basic American history in school curricula. In these debates, people across the political spectrum tend to assume that white teachers–who make up 79 percent of the public school teaching force–are comfortably, and truthfully, teaching about America’s history and the present realities of racial oppression. However, my research reveals something different: a disturbing picture of what is actually happening. […]

What I discovered was rampant racism, cruelty, and indifference from teachers working inside public schools. Most of the teachers I observed were not, in fact, teaching about America’s racist history but instead were perpetuating everyday racial violence against their students inside the classroom. While the idea is not prominent in public discourse, I am not alone in finding teacher racism to be an everyday presence in the American classroom. One recent study, for example, found that teachers hold as much implicit and explicit pro-white racial bias as nonteachers do. Education scholar Michael Dumas has written about teacher racism and Black suffering inside the classroom, showing that these attitudes have concrete outcomes. And students themselves know this. Social media is replete with students talking about teacher racism, and they have often taken to the streets to protest it.

The curriculum I witnessed in action at the elementary and middle schools I studied was certainly multicultural, as it is in many urban school districts. Teachers lectured extensively about the civil rights movement, and students read books about Black families, such as The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963, to learn about it. Teachers also received extensive anti-racist and cultural sensitivity trainings through the district and within the schools.

But what I observed in the classrooms didn’t reflect any of that. Just as Ms. Connell readily divorced past from present, another white teacher, Ms. Trevor, minimized racial oppression by suggesting it was similar to discrimination based on height. […] As all of these 9- and 10-year-old Black and brown kids started to bring in examples of various types of discriminated-against categories, such as height, weight, and age, I sate there documenting how Ms. Trevor’s lesson on the civil rights movement and segregation ended up having absolutely nothing to do with the matter at hand: racism.

Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom
by Ranita Ray

p. 3

Ribbon had nearly 800 students in Las Vegas’s Clark County School District, which at the time served over 320,000 children. In 2017, approximately 24.5 percent of students in the district were white, compared to New York City’s current 16 percent, Chicago’s 11 percent, and Los Angeles’s `10 percent. Also in 2017, 70 percent of Clark County teachers were white, closely resembling the national numbers as well.

pp. 5-6

The American left tends to valorize teachers as altruistic, self-sacrificing, benevolent people, and the conservative right despises them for supposedly indoctrinating our children with liberal sexual education and histories of racial oppression that villainize white people.

Both of these are false and both of them justify teachers’ abysmal pay and heinous working conditions: you don’t need to fight for higher pay if you come for the love of leading our next generation, and you certainly don’t need higher pay if your job is to indoctrinate innocent children.

I spent three years among fifteen teachers and talked with hundreds of others across two schools and the entire district and found one teacher who had come to the profession motivated by altruism and a love for children and teaching. And only one other expressed any interest in cultivating some kind of political consciousness in the children they taught. The teachers you will meet in this book are ordinary people for whom it is a job, a means to make ends meet. Many of them are young and have, or had, other dreams and aspirations; they come to teaching because it is a stable occupation with health insurance and a retirement plan. Over 80 percent of public school teachers in the US are white and a little over 60 percent of them white women. It’s an accessible profession for them. But fewer and fewer teachers think it a desirable job. Yet they come, perhaps because there are several routes to it that are not time-consuming–provisional licenses, traditional and nontraditional paths for those with or without a bachelor’s degree.

Teacher’s attitudes to questions of racial, gender, or class inequalities resemble those of the general public. For example, Princeton, National Institutes of Health, and Tufts researchers found that teachers harbor as much racial animosity toward nonwhite people as the general public.

After the years I spent inside public schools in Las Vegas, I was not surprised to learn that in a survey conducted in the two months preceding the November 2024 election between Donald Trump and JD Vance over Kamala Harris and former educator Tim Walz. Among educators between the ages of 45 and 60, 41 percent planned to vote for Donald Trump. To sum up, while teachers’ unions backed Harris, the story of educators is more complex.

p. 257

The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey in 2020 revealed that 3 percent of Black families engaged in homeschooling. By October of the same year, the number had gone up to 16 percent. Cheryl Field-Smith, a sociocultural scholar at the University of Georgia, has conducted research showing that a growing number of Black families are opting to homeschool to avoid racism in school. Online schools during COVID exposed some of the classroom slow violence to guardians of Black, brown, immigrant, and trans children, and many people newly confronted how many of these bullies are teachers. Black families who wanted their children to learn deeply about Black history and culture, freely and with dignity, also realized this could not occur at school.

p. 261

High-achieving poor, Black, Latinx, brown, immigrant, disabled, and Indigenous children become a testament to the great success of the US education system. Their academic success is supposedly a harbinger of a fulfilling life. But even good students were treated so poorly.

p. 262

After three years behind the closed doors of the American classroom and many more years of analyzing what I saw, it was clear to me that a focusing on the achievement gap is not only the wrong fight but often becomes a trap. The slow violence of the teachers at Ribbon and Dorena damaged and diminished their students, regardless of academic achievement.

A wide range of child abuse inside schools is not an uncommon phenomenon. CCSD took extensive precautions against student-on-student bullying or sexual harassment by teachers. The district hosted events, provided training around identifying student bullies and tackling them, and made sexual harassment trainings compulsory. the focus on sexual abuse and peer-on-peer bullying, serious issues no doubt, the districts treated as the be-all and end-all, ignoring issues of teachers bullying students.

pp. 265-6

David Stovall, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, wrote a paper called “Are We Ready for ‘School’ Abolition? Thoughts and Practices of Radical Imaginary in Education.” Three things stand out to me from the paper that give shape to the idea of school abolitionism in the legacy of the prison abolition movement. First, Stovall and other more critical scholars pf schooling have urged us to understand schooling as separate and distinct from education. Second, Stovall considers how schools in the US, as they are structured, demand and reward compliance. Finally, Stovall urges that in the tradition of prison abolitionism, we demand the impossible.

One of those impossible things is to insist on a more honest conversation about the stark power differential between teachers and students, especially little children who are ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds. The realities of larger power relations that oppress Black, brown, immigrant, and trans people coincide with this fact that teachers have absolute authority inside the classroom and students in places like Ribbon and Dorena have close to none. That teachers have it hard does not preclude the fact that they are capable of immense harm, whether they always do or not, and that the colossal power differential between mostly white teachers and their Black, brown, immigrant, queer, fat, and trans children is a material reality, and it is unsafe. But because we assume teachers’ omnipresent altruism, we don’t look carefully. Yet, most of us can recall a mean teacher, someone who at one point or another hurt or harassed us.

This is also an organizational issue–the school is a workplace where teachers have managerial authority over the students they teach. Research on work and organizations has long established how those with authority are prone to abusing their power, especially against people who are otherwise marginalized. And in most city schools, the children are racially and economically marginalized and young. So, should what I witnessed really surprise us?

This type of everyday harassment and bullying–like being labeled as sexual predators, thieves, morally bankrupt–by adults who are meant to protect them can in fact alter children’s physiology. Researchers have found that psychological stressors such as everyday harassment activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress system. The hormones released by the HPA axis help us adapt; however, chronically elevated levels during childhood and adolescence can damage this system. Stress, like that from slow violence, can negatively alter a child’s brain.

Alongside engaging a deep conversation interrogating schools as they exist, we can demand a stronger teacher’s union that fights for better pay and working conditions for teachers; that fights for Black, brown, immigrant, and queer teachers inside the classroom.