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

• Author: Adam Eckerd,Stephanie House-Niamke
• Date: 01 February 2021
• Published date: 01 February 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399720979182
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399720979182

Administration & Society

2021, Vol. 53(2) 305 –324

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0095399720979182

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Perspectives

Institutional

Injustice: How Public

Administration Has

Fostered and Can

Ameliorate Racial

Disparities

Stephanie House-Niamke1

and Adam Eckerd2

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.

Keywords

critical race theory, measurement, racial disparities

Disparities in the Modern World

In 2015, lead was found to be contaminating the drinking water supply in

Flint, Michigan. Lead contamination was the culmination of a series of

1West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA

2Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, Bloomington, USA

Corresponding Author:

Adam Eckerd, Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University-

Purdue University, Indianapolis, 1315 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN, USA.

Email: aeckerd@iu.edu

979182AASXXX10.1177/0095399720979182Administration & SocietyHouse-Niamke and Eckerd

research-article2020

306 Administration & Society 53(2)

events arguably built up over decades. Once one of the wealthiest cities in

Michigan, the dual sequences of suburbanization and manufacturing decay

left the city overwhelmingly poor and predominately Black. It was noted as

early as 1956 that the various communities in the Flint region were averse

to working collaboratively on shared infrastructure issues (Zimmer &

Hawley, 1956), with the city and its suburbs following a Tiebout (1956)

approach to public service provision, wherein the different communities in

the region saw value in competing for residents and investments rather than

cooperating across the metro area.1 As might be expected, services and

investment followed the wealthy, mostly White, residents to the suburbs,

leaving mostly Black city residents poor. Fast forwarding to 2013, gover-

nance of the city was taken over by Emergency Managers (EMs) from the

state owing to a financial crisis that the state had theretofore done virtually

nothing to prevent, the result of financial ruin after losing the bulk of its

economic base much more so than any mismanagement that had occurred.

The EMs were charged with reducing the cost of city services with one key

area being the recommissioning of the dated city water treatment facilities

rather than continuing to pipe in water from Detroit at higher expense. A

series of poor decisions, made in the name of cost savings rather than con-

cerns for the city’s residents, led to a crisis of heavily contaminated water

for the city’s residents (Pauli, 2019).

As in the Flint case, so it is in many different parts of the United States,

in many different demographic contexts, that people of certain identities are

much more likely to live under environmentally hazardous conditions. These

conditions both reflect and have implications for how people are perceived

and how they perceive themselves in their society. Environmental disparities

may arise because of a history of discrimination, or for what appear to be

purely instrumental purposes. Our aim in this essay is to illustrate that the

phenomenon of racial disparities across a wide range of settings is a multi-

faceted issue that arises, at least in part, because of the intersecting identities

that people and communities have in a society and the ways that our political

and administrative systems make sense of those identities. External percep-

tions and self-perceptions create the fabric of the institutional setting and

affect the conscious and subconscious choices that a society makes and that

communities of people endure. In this context, what one perceives that one

deserves is not a function of individuality, but rather a function of one’s

particular position in a society and how that society views their position.

And that position informs both how an individual or community perceive

themselves and are perceived by others.

To illustrate this point, we begin with an excerpt from the story, “The

Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” written by Ursula Le Guin, in 1973.