“So Poor and So Black”: Hurricane Katrina, Public Administration, and the Issue of Race

Stivers, Camilla

doi:10.1111/j.1540-6210.2007.00812.x

Cited by 79 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(15 reference statements)

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“…One needs, also, to question the logic that reasons if the centralizing approach fails to work, then even more centralization is needed." This further move toward the "centralization impulse" flies in the face of much of the research and scholarship about crisis management and particularly Katrina (Derthick 2007;Garnett and Kouzmin 2007;Stivers 2007;Lester and Krejci 2007;Morris et al 2007). It remains to be seen whether transfer of functions to the "new" FEMA under the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 constitute centralization or decentralization.…”

Section: Interpersonal Influence Lensmentioning

confidence: 92%

Crisis Communication Post Katrina: What are we Learning?

Garnett

Kouzmin

2009

Public Organ Rev

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Section: Interpersonal Influence Lensmentioning

confidence: 92%

Crisis Communication Post Katrina: What are we Learning?

Garnett

Kouzmin

2009

Public Organ Rev

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“…The result is an unfortunate history of administration action warped by conscious or unconscious racial bias-for example, failure to carry out laws intended to protect or support racial minorities, failure to apply across-theboard laws and regulations to members of minority groups, and retreat to the purported letter of the law in emergencies when less rigorous readings were clearly warranted by life-and-death circumstances (Stivers, 2007). Minority peoples who have borne the brunt of such action have a stockpile of experiential knowledge as a result.…”

Section: The Role Of Administrative Practicesmentioning

confidence: 97%

An Ethic of Race for Public Administration

Alexander

Stivers

2010

Administrative Theory & Praxis

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Remarkably little public administration scholarship has explored the dynamic of race as manifest in patterns of policy interpretation and discretionary judgments of individual administrators. We raise the issue of race in public administration despite the widespread view that the lens of race is obsolete or counterproductive. We argue that scholarship in the field has failed to come to terms with how this neglect has contributed to maintaining long-standing policies and practices with racist implications. We explore the question of whether the lens of race reveals the outline of an ethic for administrative practice. After a brief illustrative historical review, we critique the current approaches to incorporating race into administrative practice (managing diversity and cultural competence) as inadequate for the necessary rethinking at the theoretical level. We propose an ethical framework based on American pragmatist philosophy and on Hannah Arendt's notion of inclusive solidarity.Race is a complex and perplexing force that traces the fault lines of citizenship, power, and privilege through the course of U.S. history. Within this dynamic, the administrative state and public administrators have played a central, though largely unexplored, role in the interpretation and administration of government policies that positioned people outside of the state or maintained their subordinate status on the basis of race. We examine this role as well as the legal and managerial solutions that have been attempted to date, and we offer an ethic of race for administrative action grounded in pragmatism to move us beyond the racial patterns in which the academic field and practice remain embedded.We raise the issue of race despite pervasive views among social commentators, including some members of so-called minority groups, that race talk is 578

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“…The lineage of discrimination against African Americans has an extensive history, one that has not been thoroughly examined by the field of public administration (Alexander, 1997;Stivers, 2007;Witt, 2006). As early as 1910, Baltimore officials established a precedent to legally enact the forced separation of the races-the segregation ordinance (Power, 1983).…”

Section: Administrative Involvementmentioning

confidence: 98%

Aloofness or Dirty Hands?

Alkadry

Blessett

2010

Administrative Theory & Praxis

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This article takes a critical look at the actions of American public administrators affecting African Americans in inner cities in the mid-twentieth century. It compares these actions to those of British imperialist functionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that domestic American administrators and imperialist functionaries shared an ethos of serving expansion and capital, sometimes as a means to achieve what they deemed to be the public interest. They also shared the use of race as a weapon in their drive to suppress the masses of what they viewed as superfluous expendable subject races-imperialized natives by British administrators or African Americans by U.S. administrators. Using Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, this article traces the role of administrators in the alliance between mob and capital that resulted in the resegregation and dispossession of African-American communities in much of urban America. This article argues that the combination of racism and public administration was used to subjugate and control subject races in British imperialized territories and in urban America.

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“So Poor and So Black”: Hurricane Katrina, Public Administration, and the Issue of Race

Cited by 79 publications

References 17 publications

Crisis Communication Post Katrina: What are we Learning?

Crisis Communication Post Katrina: What are we Learning?

An Ethic of Race for Public Administration

Aloofness or Dirty Hands?

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