Editor's Introduction

• Author: Danny L. Balfour
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12802
• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017

621

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 4, pp. 621. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12802.

Book Review

Editor ’ s

Introduction

I n his review of Daniel Kato ’ s book, Liberalized

Lynching , Frank Anechiarico asks, “How central

should race be in public administration research

and scholarship?” Certainly, it should be more central

than it has been. Race barely garners a mention in

PA textbooks, except perhaps in connection with

representative bureaucracy and affirmative action/

diversity. Not nearly enough is said about the extent

to which race, and racism, were and remain entangled

within the founding and identity of modern public

administration. It is not a coincidence that the

purging of African-Americans from the federal civil

service occurred during the Progressive Era and under

the administration of President Woodrow Wilson.

Civil service “reform” associated blacks with patronage

and inefficiency, and whites with meritocracy and

efficiency. This history is well documented in the

book reviewed by Amber Williams, Racism in the

Nation ’ s Service: Government Workers and the Color

Line in Woodrow Wilson ’ s America . Sadly, this era of

reform coincided with the Jim Crow era throughout

the South and the practice of lynching, which, as

Kato chronicles, was facilitated by the inaction and

indifference of the federal government and the courts.

That indifference was at least somewhat replaced

by judicial and legislative progress in voting rights,

culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the

apparent end of a long and hard-fought process of

enfranchisement of marginalized populations. But as

Karima Jackson points out in her review of The Rise

and Fall of the Voting Rights Act , progress on such rights

can and has been rolled back by revanchist forces that

resist perceived threats and seek to restore a lost sense

of supremacy. Nowhere have these forces been more

evident than in the unbending, and often mindless,

resistance to the Obama presidency and his policy

agenda. As in public administration, political science

finds it hard to include race in its analytical frameworks,

as evidenced by the otherwise insightful overview

of the Obama Administration ’ s domestic agenda

provided by John Graham, reviewed by Davia Downey.

The asymmetry of those eight years is stark: the first

African-American president striving to downplay race

and govern for all Americans, while his unrelenting

opposition tries to delegitimize his presidency at

every turn with veiled (and sometimes explicit) racial

animosity. “Repealing and replacing Obamacare” is

not so much about healthcare as its about undoing the

signature accomplishment of the first black president,

as evidenced by the gleeful, all-white celebration

on the White House lawn of an ill-conceived (and

mostly unexamined) bill passed by the House of

Representatives. Meanwhile, the new Attorney General

is “reviewing” the Obama Justice Department ’ s reviews

of police practices across the nation aimed at reducing

racial disparities in police shootings and arrests.

Yes, progress can be stymied, even reversed. The

history of the Jews of Europe should be more than

enough to convince us of that. By 1850, most of

western Europe had emancipated the Jews from

their historical state of discrimination and exclusion,

bestowing full rights of citizenship. Ninety years later:

genocide, in the name of the “Master Race.” This and

the American history found in the books reviewed

here remind us of how hard the path to equality and

human rights is, and how easily it can be undone.

Danny L. Balfour

Grand Valley State University