An Ethic of Race for Public Administration

Abstract

Remarkably little public administration scholarship has explored the dynamic of race as manifest in patterns of policy interpretation and discretionary judgments of individual administrators. We raise the issue of race in public administration despite the widespread view that the lens of race is obsolete or counterproductive. We argue that scholarship in the field has failed to come to terms with how this neglect has contributed to maintaining long-standing policies and practices with racist implications. We explore the question of whether the lens of race reveals the outline of an ethic for administrative practice. After a brief illustrative historical review, we critique the current approaches to incorporating race into administrative practice (managing diversity and cultural competence) as inadequate for the necessary rethinking at the theoretical level. We propose an ethical framework based on American pragmatist philosophy and on Hannah Arendt's notion of inclusive solidarity.Race is a complex and perplexing force that traces the fault lines of citizenship, power, and privilege through the course of U.S. history. Within this dynamic, the administrative state and public administrators have played a central, though largely unexplored, role in the interpretation and administration of government policies that positioned people outside of the state or maintained their subordinate status on the basis of race. We examine this role as well as the legal and managerial solutions that have been attempted to date, and we offer an ethic of race for administrative action grounded in pragmatism to move us beyond the racial patterns in which the academic field and practice remain embedded.We raise the issue of race despite pervasive views among social commentators, including some members of so-called minority groups, that race talk is 578

Vampires Suck

“…Injustice is introduced, however, when differences are aligned with negative formations of thought, where these conceptions influence public policy in such a way as to create Others. Degenerative politics, public policies that exploit and manipulate negative social constructs, symbols, or logic in policy design for political and economic capital (Ingram & Schneider, 2005), have become commonplace in American public policy and administration, as evidenced in housing policies (Sidney, 2005), social welfare legislation (Jurik & Cowgill, 2005), urban migration (Alkadry & Blessett, 2010), prisoner interrogation and abuse (Alkadry & Witt, 2009), and the overall administration and enforcement of laws (Alexander & Stivers, 2010). The highlighted discourses in True Blood and American society represent examples of dominant narratives symbolizing cultural imperialism, inequality, and assimilation.…”

“…In addition to a model that engages the powerful and the powerless, there is also a third agent-the structure-that allows, supports, and creates this power dynamic (Young, 1990). For example, race in the United States evolved from a social construction of imagery and narrative into the embedment of these images in legislation that determined citizenship and human and civil rights (Alexander & Stivers, 2010). The distributive understanding of power ignores these structures, focusing only on resource inequality.…”

Public Service Values and Disparate Performance: The Case of Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program

“…This stage attempts to identify: 1. Public administrators' discursive devices towards citizens in terms of values and attitudes, specially their capitalization of technical expertise as source of discretion (Foucault, 1980), the rationales behind their attitudes (Alexander & Stivers, 2010;Alkadry & Blessett, 2010;Marr, 2016) and their utilized set of values, 2. The perceived scope of public administrators' actions during the implementation process, including those possible constrictions posed by structural factors (Marr, 2016: 225), and, 3.…”

“…4 below). First, I address public administrators' discursive devices towards citizens in terms of values and attitudes, especially their capitalization of technical expertise as a source of discretion (Foucault, 1980), the rationale behind their attitudes (Alexander & Stivers, 2010;Alkadry & Blessett, 2010;Marr, 2016),…”

“…I pay special attention to neutrality and their capitalization of their technical expertise as a source of discretion (Foucault, 1980). I also examine the rationale behind their attitudes (Alexander & Stivers, 2010;Alkadry & Blessett, 2010;Marr, 2016), and the particular set of public service values utilized by Section 8 workers while implementing the Program. Second, I study public administrators' perceived scope of their actions during the implementation process.…”