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PAR Editorials seek to raise the salience of important public administration themes. Social justice is one of the defining themes of our times and in this editorial statement, we clarify some basic issues and offer a vision for future scholarship and practice. This statement is co-authored with notable public administration scholars, many affiliated with the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES). I am especially grateful to Cam Stivers, Sanjay Pandey, and Leisha DeHart-Davis for their leadership in crafting this editorial statement.

In his seminal study, T. H. Marshall (1950) posited that welfare state policies define the social rights of citizenship, or citizens' rights to participate fully and equally in society. Researchers have established that the social rights of citizenship-codified in social welfare, wage, taxation, and workfamily policies-have important implications for inequality. With increasing inequality (Piketty and Goldhammer 2014), understanding the role of these policies in reinforcing or minimizing inequality is particularly important. Following other researchers, we focus on income inequality among households with children (Crosnoe and

This study is an epistemic reflexive examination of race in representative bureaucracy theory, responding to the criticism that its conceptualization has been narrow. To counter socially reinforced ways of thinking, we use a problematizing review method to read broadly and selectively. Reviewing a sample of articles published in public administration (immediate research domain); political science (neighboring domain); sociology and Asian/cultural/ethnic studies (indirectly relevant domains) between 2017 and 2021 and paying attention to social constructionism, we examined how race and ethnicity are conceptualized. While the articles in public administration focused on a binary conception of race, treating differential outcomes as natural, articles sampled from other domains explained how ethnoracial categories were constructed, highlighted the contextual nature of differential outcomes, and engaged with the issue of racialization. To expand the conception of race in public administration, we must explore the process in which racial constructs became associated with unequal outcomes.