Institutional Injustice: How Public Administration Has Fostered and Can Ameliorate Racial Disparities

Abstract

In a culture with institutionalized racial disparities, administrative norms that attempt to ensure rational decisions through the use of aggregation and quantification can exacerbate the racial disparities that policy attempts to address. We argue that it will be difficult for policy to address the problem without a fundamental reorientation of the ways that administrators make decisions based on race. We conclude by offering some suggestions for how this reorientation can begin.

Racialized Emotional Labor: An Unseen Burden in the Public Sector

“…White normativity provides an indicator of an organization’s racial competence, which provides insight on how race will be treated by the organization and its members. The perceptions individuals and institutions hold regarding racial identity have a dramatic impact on the experience of minoritized individuals (House-Niamke & Eckerd, 2021). In this context, perceptions from individual employees and their organizations can deeply impact the emotional labor requirements of minority public administrators.…”

“…While public administration scholarship has conducted decades of research on issues of diversity (see Sabharwal et al, 2018, for a review), scholars have voiced concern that these discussions are too broad and tend to avoid explicitly addressing race and racism in public organizations (Gooden, 2014; Starke et al, 2018). In recent years, scholars have attempted to address this critique by giving more attention to how race is constructed and what this means for public organizations (Heckler, 2017; House-Niamke & Eckerd, 2021; Portillo et al, 2020; Starke et al, 2018). An assumption underlying much of this research is that white normativity is central to how race is constructed in the United States, and that when exploring issues of racial equity, we must begin by first recognizing the presence of white normativity in our institutions and government.…”

“…Specifically, race acts as a means of categorizing individuals that shapes behavior and creates power relations (Starke et al, 2018). Individuals and the institutions they create hold perceptions of race that create racialized experiences for every other person in a society (House-Niamke & Eckerd, 2021). The United States has a long history of racial bias with lasting impacts on the public sector (Alexander & Stivers, 2020).…”

Confronting Racism in All Forms of Pain Research: A Shared Commitment for Engagement, Diversity, and Dissemination

“…Although this dissemination avenue receives the most time and effort, authors do not often consider how elements of the manuscript may perpetuate racism and bias. For example, racialized categories may be needed to identify and remediate inequities, but as a consequence, the focus on differences may reinforce racism 70 . Race must be acknowledged as a social construct that is tangibly experienced and shifts in terms of context, setting, and geographic region.…”

Mechanisms of injustice: what we (do not) know about racialized disparities in pain

“…Drawing on the socioecological model, 11 , 12 Figure 1 presents a heuristic model of mutually interacting cultural , structural , and interpersonal injustice domains that influence individual - level (intrapersonal) processes and contribute to disparities pain outcomes, offering the architecture to investigate and target these factors. The model illustrates that multilevel external factors (eg, stereotypes and policies) create and maintain the racialized experience 49 and thus the pain outcomes of Black Americans. The model closely aligns with the syndemic theory 90 in acknowledging (1) the longstanding role of societal forces that have resulted in political, social, economic, and power inequities; (2) inequities shaping the distribution of risks and health resources; and (3) the multiple synergistic effects in which power inequities and biological, social, and economic processes overlap.…”