Achieving social equity: From problems to solutions By M. E. Guy & S. A. McCandless (Eds.), Irvine, CA: Melvin & Leigh. 2020. pp. 194 $44.95 (paperback)

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• Author: Kay Brown,Ashley E. Nickels,Hannah Schaefer
• Date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13682

Received: 12 October 2020Accepted: 7 June 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13682

Achieving social equity: From

problems to solutions

By M. E. Guy & S. A. McCandless (Eds.),

Irvine, CA: Melvin & Leigh. 2020. pp. 194

$44.95 (paperback)

Kay Brown|Ashley E. Nickels|

Hannah Schaefer

Kent State University

Ashley E. Nickels

Kent State University

Email: anickel5@kent.edu

The publication of Achieving Social Equity: From Problems

to Solutions, co-edited by Mary E. Guy and Sean

A. McCandless, is both welcomed and needed at this

moment in history. Released in March 2020, little did

the editors and authors know that we would be read-

ing this in the midst of a “double pandemic”

(Gooden, 2020). Protests against police brutality and

anti-Black racism have rattled the United States. The

COVID-19 pandemic has created a renewed sense of

urgency to interrogate local, state, and federal policy

decisions and examine the disparate economic and

health impacts of the disease on women, low-wage

earners, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

Further, this book arrived as the federal government

repealed protections prohibiting discrimination in healthcare

for transgender individuals (Simmons-Duffin, 2020). It arrived

during a presidential election cycle, wherein the incumbent

party’s platform lists the American family as the foundation

of a civil society, explicitly stating, “…the cornerstone of the

family is natural marriage, the union of one man and one

woman”and declaring, “we do not accept the Supreme

Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal…”

(Republican National Committee, 2020, pp. 31–32).

Government and public administration can be a tool

for good and a tool for evil (Balfour et al., 2019); and, as

the authors eloquently illustrate throughout the book,

public administration can be a tool for good if grounded in

a commitment to social equity. While mainstream public

administration continues to focus on efficiency, effective-

ness, and economy—the pandemic, civil unrest, and more

have made it clear that we not only need to include a

social equity lens in our work—we must center it! This

book provides us with a framework for how to do just that.

Social equity, as a construct, can be defined as, “the

democratic constitutional values of fairness, justice, equal

opportunity, and equality…and embodies a host of con-

cepts, legal tools, and public policies, including, …equal

employment opportunity, affirmative action and diversity

initiatives”(Riccucci, 2009, p. 374; see also, Blessett

et al., 2019). Social equity, as an analytic lens, makes

explicit historic systems of oppression that perpetuate

inequality, requiring us to put aside calls for equal treat-

ment or equal opportunity and recognizing, as McCand-

less and Guy suggest, “different people and different

groups have different needs”(p. 2). From this perspective,

it requires that we understand how our processes and

procedures create and scaffold inequities and how to dis-

rupt and dismantle those systems and structures to

achieve a fair, just, and equitable society.

The book offers an important contribution to social

equity scholarship and public administration, more

broadly, by drawing on and applying a critical-

intersectional lens. Intersectionality was initially coined by

Crenshaw (1989). Intersectionality is “agathering place

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