Beginning as a lecturer in English at Sonoma State University in 1981, he moved to chair of the Communications Studies Department from 1988 to 2007, while serving as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat.

He taught at Winston-Salem State College in the summer of 1964, then married and moved to England in the fall to study British and American literature at the University of Manchester.

He received his Ph.D. in 1967 with a dissertation on the mythology of imperialism in the work of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, and obtained his first full-time teaching position in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1967 to 1972.

The Mythology of Imperialism has since been republished in a new edition by Monthly Review Press, with a new introduction and conclusion by Raskin and a foreword by Columbia literature professor Bruce Robbins.

[3] Identifying with the growing social movements of the late 1960s, Raskin joined the building occupation led by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Columbia University in 1968.

He covered the trial of the Panther 21 in New York in 1970, and wrote about such fugitives and prisoners as Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement and Oscar Collazo, the Puerto Rican nationalist.

Gradually detaching himself from New York and the radical left, Raskin began to meet such California writers as Tillie Olsen and Jessica Mitford, and pitched ideas for movies to Hollywood producers.

He created the characters and the story about marijuana cultivation in northern California for the movie Homegrown, eventually produced in 1996 and directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal; Raskin appears in a crowd scene at the end of the film.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Raskin wrote scores of book reviews for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications.

His signature format coupled his reviews with separate in-depth interviews that often evoked wide-ranging conversations with the authors, including writers from Doris Lessing and Kurt Vonnegut to Alice Walker and Greg Sarris.

Raskin explores the consequences of Ginsberg's mother's mental illness on the theme of societal insanity in "Howl", and relates the court case that set a new direction for artistic freedom at the end of the repressive 1950s.

A final moment of political disillusionment with the radical left and dreams of Third World socialism came with a visit to Hanoi in 1995, where he experienced Vietnam as a country run by a Communist elite rapidly enriching themselves from a freewheeling capitalist economy.

[16] He contributed a commentary column and a negative review of Barbara Kingsolver's novel Demon Copperhead to County Highway[1], a print-only publication created by David Samuels and Walter Kirn, for its debut edition of July-August 2023.