Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him; Laurence Ralph

A riveting and heart-wrenching story of violence, grief and the American justice system, exploring the systemic issues that perpetuate gang participation in one of the wealthiest cities in the country, through the story of one teenager. 

In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito’s. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on.

But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito’s half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito’s murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a profoundly different, deeply personal way.
 
Written from Ralph's perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito's family and as an Ivy League professor and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, SITO is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger, and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance, and ultimately grace.

February 20, 2024

About the Author

Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Before that, he was a Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, where he taught for nearly a decade. He earned his Ph.D. (2010) and Masters of Arts degrees (2006) in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree (2004) from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he majored in History, Technology and Society. His research and writing explores how police abuse, mass incarceration, and crime make disease, disability, and premature death seem like natural outcomes for people of color, who are often seen as expendable by “polite” society.

Ralph is known for using careful and deliberate description rather than esoteric theory to ensure that his research findings are comprehensible to a broader range of intellectuals, experts, college students, and curious readers. In each of his research projects, he discusses experiences of violence, debilitating injury, and/or death to examine the stereotypes and prejudices associated with America’s inner-cities.

Ralph has been awarded a number of honors and prestigious fellowships for his research, some of which include: Cultural Anthropology grants from the National Science Foundation as well as the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a visiting fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Research Council of the National Academies, and the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Post-Doctoral fellowship from the University of Michigan.

Ralph currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter.