2412 - The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City (University of California Press, 2017) by Ranita Ray

Session Submission Type: Author Meets Critics Session

Description

Historically, ethnographies of economically marginalized communities of color foreground “risk behaviors” such as drug use, gangs, violence and teen parenthood as central to understanding, and ameliorating poverty. Families, schools, nonprofit organizations, academics, and policy makers stress risk behaviors in their efforts to end the cycle of poverty. Rooted in white masculinist traditions, such representations of poor communities of color as “at risk” work to perpetuate racist and classist discourses around poverty. In the feminist urban ethnography The Making of a Teenage Service Class, Ranita Ray followed a group of economically black and brown marginalized youth, for three years, who are not part of the negative outcome statistics. Ray describes the processes through which marginalized youth, who try to become upwardly mobile by following the “mobility rules” such as going to college and working multiple jobs, and avoiding risk behaviors, end up as low-wage service workers. Drawing on intersectional feminisms, Ray argues that this risk discourse reinforces oppressive class and racial hierarchies, ignores the problematization of black and brown youth and their cultures, and diverts resources that could better support marginalized youth’s efforts to reach their educational and occupational goals.

Sub Unit

• Author Meets Critics

Session Organizer

• Georgiann Davis, University of Nevada-Las Vegas

Author

• Ranita Ray, University of Nevada-Las Vegas

Presider

• Jennifer Randles, California State University-Fresno

Critics

• Elizabeth A. Armstrong, University of Michigan

• Tressie Cottom, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Lorena Garcia, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Shamus Rahman Khan, Columbia University