Book Review: Race and Social Equity: A Nervous Area of Government

Abstract

Susan Gooden's most recent book, Race and Social Equity, is a must-read for all public servants, public administration professors, and graduate students. Gooden uses H. George Frederickson's (2010) contribution to social equity and public administration as a theoretical foundation to examine the relationship between race, history, and public administration. Gooden does this by expanding the two Es of public administration-efficiency and effectiveness-to include three with her recommendation to include equity as the third component. Race and Social Equity forces the reader to examine the racial awareness management practices in public-sector organizations. The contents, combined with Gooden's writing style, transform our collective thoughts around race into a balanced, readable text. The first four chapters are key to understanding the book. Chapters 5 through 8 give practical examples for street-level bureaucrats interested in the implementation of workplace programs. Chapters 9 and 10 apply more to Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA)-accredited Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs. The final chapter lists 10 principles that will reduce overt and covert racism in the public sector and conquer the "nervousness in government" surrounding race. Her use of graphics throughout the book explicates ideas that are useful in the classroom or personnel training center. Upon finishing the book, one realizes he or she is not alone in the struggle to understand race and culture in the workplace and the classroom. Although Race and Social Equity is valuable, it has limitations.The absence of cross-cultural examples used by Gooden in her previous work, Cultural Competency in Public Administration, could limit discussions that derive from her new book to a "black or white issue" (Norman-Major & Gooden, 2012). Race and Social Equity focuses exclusively upon race, as the title implies. Stronger links between race and intergenerational poverty or how race interacts with persons living in urban, suburban, and rural communities would make Race and Social Equity stronger. Last, the book could have been sectioned between those chapters that are more useful to the professor and the practitioner.Chapter 1 explains why race is and is not the "nervous area of government" (see Gooden, 2014, p. 10). Gooden (2014) explicitly states the book's intent to "conceptualize the idea of a nervous area of government" by addressing race "not to engage in oppression Olympics by ranking group inequities relative to one another" (p. 10). In short, a client's or co-worker's race can make public administrators nervous. As a result, they avoid the subject or use passive terminology to voice their nervousness.The book's definition of racism, as it applies to public administration, is not "discrimination in contact" but "discrimination in contract" (see Gooden, 2014, p. 10). The first term refers to the unequal treatment due to race in commercial transactions in both the public and private sectors, including one...