Rashawn Ray

• Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
• Professor (Associate) at University of Maryland, College Park

Police violence is a pressing public health problem. To gauge the illness associations of police killings – the most severe form of police brutality, we compile a unique multilevel dataset that nests individual-level health data from the 2009–2013 New York City Community Health Survey (nij = 39,267) within neighbourhood-level data from 2003 to 2012...

Similar to previous social movement organizations, the Movement for Black Lives (MBL) has faced a myriad of critiques. Adam Szetela is one of the recent to do so. My essay aims to set the record straight on some of the main critiques in Szetela’s article. I deal with comparisons to the Civil Rights Movement, the achievement of MBL, and Black essent...

Background: Sociodemographic and environmental factors play important roles in determining both indoor and outdoor play activities in children. Methods: The Built Environment and Active Play Study assessed neighborhood playability for children (7-12 y), based on parental report of their children's active play behaviors, neighborhood characterist...

The use of active transportation (AT), such as walking, cycling, or even public transit, as a means of transport offers an opportunity to increase youth physical activity and improve health. Despite the well-known benefits of AT, there are environmental and social variables that converge on the AT experiences of low-income youth and youth of color...

Background: Although the active transportation (AT) indicator received an F grade on the 2016 US Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth, this AT assessment excluded public transportation. An objective of the Built Environment and Active Play Study was to assess youth AT, including public transportation, among Washington, DC area c...

Sedentary behavior and physical inactivity are significant contributors to youth obesity in the United States. Neighborhood dog walking is an outlet for physical activity (PA). Therefore, understanding the relationship between built environment, dog ownership, and youth PA is essential. This study examined the influence of dog ownership and parenta...

This article explores how school gardens provide learning opportunities for school-aged children while concurrently helping cities achieve sustainability. The authors analyse this process in Washington, DC, a particularly innovative metropolis in the United States. This national capital city boasts two of the most progressive examples of legislatio...

Can a diverse crowd of individuals whose interests focus on distinct issues related to racial identity, class, gender, and sexuality mobilize around a shared issue? If so, how does this process work in practice? To date, limited research has explored intersectionality as a mobilization tool for social movements. This paper unpacks how intersectiona...

Recent killings of blacks by police have renewed a national discussion about crime, racism, unjust treatment, and implicit bias. Outfitting police officers with body-worn cameras (BWC) is heralded by federal and state lawmakers as one solution to providing more transparency during police encounters. Missing from this discussion is what everyday cit...

Blacks and Latinos are less likely than whites to have health insurance access and utilize health care. One way to overcome some of these racial barriers to health equity may be through advances in technology that allow people to access and utilize health care in innovative ways. Yet, little research has focused on whether the racial gap that exist...

Social media activism presents sociologists with the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of how groups form and sustain collective identities around political issues throughout the course of a social movement. This paper contributes to a growing body of sociological literature on social media by applying an intersectional framework to a c...

Recent events related to police brutality and the evolution of #BlackLivesMatter provides an empirical case to explore the vitality of social media data for social movements and the evolution of collective identities. Social media data provide a portal into how organizing and communicating generate narratives that survive over time. We analyse 31.6...

Using a sample of middle class blacks and whites living in urban and suburban areas, this paper focuses on how perceptions of the racial composition of neighborhoods influence leisure-time physical activity. Using an ordinal representation of an underlying continuous indication of the perceived percentage of blacks and whites within an egocentric n...

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An objective of the Built Environment and Active Play (BEAP) Study was to examine whether home built environment, bedroom electronic presence, parental rules and demographics predicted children's sedentary behavior (SB). In 2014, BEAP Study questionnaires were mailed to 2000 parents of children (7–12years) within the Washington DC area. SB-Duration...

W. E. B. Du Bois’s perspective on education was that the social and physical environments outside of schools matter to the learning that takes place inside schools. Existing research shows that due to environmental disparities in school and neighborhood contexts, Black and low-income children spend less time in activities that promote physical, cog...

Objective: Previous research identified associations between perceived built environment and adult physical activity; however, fewer studies have explored associations in children. The Built Environment and Active Play (BEAP) Study examined relationships between children's active play and parental perceptions of home neighborhood built environment...

Widespread awareness of the recent deaths of several black males at the hands of police has revealed an unaddressed public health challenge-determining the root causes of excessive use of force by police applied to black males that may result in "justifiable homicides." The criminalization of black males has a long history in the USA, which has res...

The social science literature suggests that middle class status, with all that it promises, is precarious for those blacks who have achieved it and remains out of reach for many others in the United States. As members of a minority group, middle-class blacks face historical and persistent marginalization, discrimination, and racism; consequently, t...

PurposePast research indicates that blacks are less trusting of physicians than are whites; yet, researchers have not examined within group differences in physician trust by religious denomination – an effort that is complicated by the high correlated nature of race and religion. To better understand black-white differences in physician trust, this...

Background Research has demonstrated that children who participate in active play are more likely to be physically active, thereby improving long-term health outcomes. Many adult studies have also shown that neighborhood built environments can encourage or discourage routine physical activity. Limited evidence has demonstrated that children who res...

An admissions committee is choosing between two students for its final medical school slot. Mark, compared to Derek, comes from a more prestigious university and has a slightly higher grade point average (GPA), better medical college admission test (MCAT) scores, and more recommendations from scholars known for their research publications. Derek’s...

This article examines the mentoring experiences of 58 underrepresented minority (URM) faculty at 22 research-extensive institutions. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus group data, participants discussed the impor-tance of mentoring across the life course, the ideal attributes of mentoring relationships, the challenges to effective mentoring,...

Students of color inevitably come to the classroom with a fundamentally different relationship to the social construct of race than do their white peers. While whites may have spent little time consciously exploring what it means to be white previous to joining our classes, most students of color will have been deeply and personally grappling with...

This chapter reviews current social psychological theories, conceptions, and perspectives related to social class inequalities. First, we discuss definitions of social class and argue that class is an especially powerful and pernicious form of inequality. Then, we detail the processes that develop within the three “I” levels: (I) interactions, (II)...

In this essay, I make the case that the intersectionality framework is useful to explain the high level of obesity among Black women. I describe how the intersectionality framework reformulates the examination of racial and gender disparities in health by deconstructing traditional frames of Whiteness and maleness. Next, I discuss key barriers that...

The traditional conception of an African American civil rights organization is one in which the primary focus of the organization is racial justice. The NAACP, National Urban League, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference fit this long and traditional mold. However, there are African American organizations that have what organizational behavi...

In this article, my coauthors and I analyze hazing as a legal issue both within the civil and criminal context. We then posit that hazing is not the same across collegiate, Greek-letter organizations. Specifically, we contend that the intersection of race and gender should reveal differences in how hazing manifests itself. In an archival study of f...

Research comparing the experiences of black and white fraternities in the same university context has been relatively absent. Because black and white fraternities often face different normative institutional arrangements (e.g. community size, living arrangements and organizational structure), it is important to examine how these arrangements shape...

Purpose - Utilizing the intersectionality framework, this study examines how a racially diverse group of adults aim to balance work-family life. Methodology/approach - This chapter uses qualitative data from the Intersections of Family, Work, and Health Study consisting of 132 black, white, and Mexican-American adults. Findings - We find that socio...

Violent hazing has been a longstanding issue within African American, collegiate fraternities and sororities, otherwise known as Black Greek-Letter Organizations (BGLOs). This article investigates how and what hazing victims know about their hazing experiences. Additionally, the article examines how victims’ knowledge of hazing may hold serious imp...

Although much research documents the growth of a “professional middle class” among African Americans over the past several decades, we know comparatively little about how Blacks see themselves in social class terms, and whether this has changed over time. In the current study, we use data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Surveys to analyze tren...

We explore how race and gender shape graduate students' perceptions of their advisors. We find evidence that women of color and students in the biological/physical sciences report significantly less support than other groups. Our findings speak to the utility of the intersectionality framework for examining interpersonal relations in higher educati...

While names like Charles Hamilton Houston (architect of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund strategy to end school segregation), Rosa Parks (mother of the Civil Rights Movement), Earl B. Dickerson (civil rights lawyer and first black University of Chicago Law School graduate), Sadie Alexander (first African American woman to earn a PhD, and first to earn...

There has been limited empirical research on how individuals “do privilege.” As a result, our understandings are incomplete about how high-status groups continue reaping the benefits of privilege. Using data from fifty-two men in three white and four black fraternities at a predominately white institution, this paper demonstrates that visibility an...

This paper aims to fill an important gap in the literature on BGLOs—how black fraternity men treat women. Analyzing interview and observation data from a 9-month study including 28 black fraternity men, I find that the level of accountability, visibility, and personalization elicited by the small black community at PWIs leads to black fraternity me...

Methodological traditions are like any other social phenomena. They are made by people working together, criticizing one another, and borrowing from other traditions. They are living social things, not abstract categories in a single system.– Andrew Abbott (2004, p. 15)

Social scientists implicate high-status men as sexually objectifying women. Yet, few have investigated these men’s perceptions and accounts of their own experiences. Racial variation in gender relations in college has also received little scholarly attention. Analyzing 30 in-depth, individual interviews and surveys and two focus group interviews fr...

Despite widespread theoretical assertions on family role expectations, there have been few empirical, systematic assessments on how the family role expectations of men compare across racial/ethnic groups. Using the intersectionality paradigm and a mixed methods approach on a unique data set which encompasses 46 Black, white, and Mexican-American fa...