Ijeoma Oluo. 2020. Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. New York: Seal Press. 336 pp.; $28 (Hardcover). ISBN: 9781580059510

• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Author: Staci M. Zavattaro
• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13411

Book Reviews 985

Frederickson, H. George, Kevin B. Smith, Christopher W. Larimer,

and Michael J. Licari. 2016. The Public Administration Theory

Primer, 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Goold, Benjamin. 2018. More than Privacy: Thinking Ethically

about Public Era Surveillance. In The Routledge Handbook of

Ethics and Public Policy, edited by Annabelle Lever and Andrei

Poama, 102–14. New York: Routledge.

Howard, Jeffrey. 2018. The Public Role of Ethics and Public Policy.

In The Routledge Handbook of Ethics and Public Policy, edited by

Annabelle Lever and Andrei Poama, 25–36. New York: Routledge.

Lever, Annabelle, and Andrei Poama, eds. 2018. The Routledge

Handbook of Ethics and Public Policy. New York, NY: Routledge.

Wolff, Jonathan. 2019. Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical

Inquiry, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge.

Reviewed by: Staci M. Zavattaro

University of Central Florida

Ijeoma Oluo. 2020. Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of

White Male America. New York: Seal Press. 336 pp.; $28

(Hardcover). ISBN: 9781580059510

On January 6, 2021, an angry mob of White

men (and women) stormed the United States

Capitol building in Washington, D.C. in an

attempt to overthrow the government by protesting

the results a free and fair election. Many of the rioters

wore symbols of White supremacy including anti-

Semitic propaganda, the Confederate flag, and other

nationalist paraphernalia (Ray 2020). As Ray (2020,

para. 1) writes: “Make no mistake, the Capitol

insurgency was about making America great again for

White people.” The insurrection resulted in the deaths

of Capitol police officers and one of the insurgents

inside the building.

The United States is built on a system that supports

and encourages the exercise of White power over

others. Since the country’s founding, slavery has

been embedded in the social structures, eventually

leading to “the breakdown of the political system and

civil war” (Knott 2011, s30). While the Declaration

of Independence and the U.S. Constitution might

have focused on social equity for all men created

equal, the documents and Founders leave out

women, Black slaves, Native Americans, and the poor

(Gooden 2017).

More contemporarily, we still see the lingering

effects of White power protection in the

administrative state. COVID-19, for one example,

is adversely affecting Black and Latinx populations

in the United States (Gaynor and Wilson 2020;

Wright and Merritt 2020) when compared to

White populations. Instances of violence against

Asians and Asian-Americans also increased as

political actors labeled COVID-19 “the China

virus” as an intentional slur (Roberto, Johnson and

Rauhaus 2020). Women lost jobs at greater rates

than male counterparts because of the pandemic

(Bateman and Ross 2020), leaving room for

improvement in policies such as universal childcare

(Elias and D’Agostino 2020). The pandemic has

shined a bright light on the inequities built into and

prevalent within our administrative state.

In these turbulent times, focusing on social equity

and social justice is critical for public administration

practice, research, and pedagogy. While early

philosophers reminded us about the urgency of a

social contract and the need for structural (policy,

constitutional) solutions, social equity became

a clear administrative concern within the field

in the 1940s, solidifying its place in 1968 after

the first Minnowbrook conference (Guy and

McCandless 2012). Using social equity as a lens helps

us better understand complex social problems directly

affecting much of the U.S. population (Guy and

McCandless 2012).

In her book Mediocre, Ijeoma Oluo, author of So

You Want to Talk About Race, takes an historical

approach to understand the legacy of White men in

America. She begins the book powerfully by offering

a quotation that kept coming up while discussing

living in a world run by men: “works according to

Staci M. Zavattaro is an associate professor

of public administration at the University of

Central Florida. She serves as editor-in-chief

of Administrative Theory & Praxis.

Email: staci.zavattaro@ucf.edu

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 5, pp. 985–987. © 2021 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13411.