An Ethic of Race for Public Administration

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 We raise the issue of race in public administration despite the widespread view that the lens of race is obsolete or counterproductive.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.