The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City

by Ranita Ray

Winner of the 2018 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems
 
Winner of the 2020 Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Pacific Sociological Association
 
Honorable Mention, 2019 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Section on Race, Gender, and Class 
 
Finalist, 2020. Bourdieu Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Section on the Sociology of Education
 
In The Making of a Teenage Service Class, Ranita Ray uncovers the pernicious consequences of focusing on risk behaviors such as drug use, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood as the key to ameliorating poverty. Ray recounts the three years she spent with sixteen poor black and brown youth, documenting their struggles to balance school and work while keeping commitments to family, friends, and lovers. Hunger, homelessness, untreated illnesses, and long hours spent traveling between work, school, and home disrupted their dreams of upward mobility. While families, schools, nonprofit organizations, academics, and policy makers stress risk behaviors in their efforts to end the cycle of poverty, Ray argues that this strategy reinforces class and racial hierarchies and diverts resources that could better support marginalized youth's efforts to reach their educational and occupational goals.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction

298 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2017

About the author

Dr. Ranita Ray is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico, where she holds an endowed chair. For 15 years, her award-winning research program has centered on children & youth, education, and gender and racial injustice. She spends long periods of times in places to write about them.

Reviews

[Mackenzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had to read this book for my sociology class. Would not have chosen to read it on my own free will.

[Catie Higgins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this for my Intro to Sociology course and found it to be really insightful as a future educator. Ray does a good job of highlighting how schools have failed students of color who are living in poverty and adresses the areas that the American education system needs to fix in order for these students to succeed.

[Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book dismantling the approaches that put forward dealing with the effects of poverty rather than causes ("risk behaviors" vs economic reality). However the book suffers from a lot of repetition.

[Mills College Library]

362.7092 R2644 2018