Race and Public Administration

This chapter seeks to make two additional contributions to current conversations. First, the substantive chapters have only examined four policy areas and clearly do not exhaust all areas where race interfaces with public administration. This chapter will briefly summarize additional work on race and public administration in employment, housing, environment policy, and welfare policy. The objective will be to provide an overview of these areas to demonstrate that the more detailed cases in the other chapters are not unique. Second, the chapter will recap some major theoretical themes that weave through the previous chapters, including the importance of institutions, the biases inherent in bureaucratic procedures, the importance placed on representative bureaucracy, and the interrelationship of all areas of policy.