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

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.

Author: Ranita Ray
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 10/31/2017
Pages: 300
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780520292062
ISBN10: 0520292065
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Poverty & Homelessness
- Social Science | Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies

About the Author
Ranita Ray is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.