ABSTRACT

Chapter 1 provided a brief review of the history and evolution of public administration in the United States with particular emphasis on events that were important for the inclusion, growth, and development of African American public administrators, as well as for the quality of life for African American citizens collectively. We concluded with a challenge to public administrators to seek the proper balance between efficiency and equity and to recognize effectiveness and equity as compatible rather than competing values of public administration. Too often, however, public policies have failed to provide such a balance and the resulting consequences have had a negative and inequitable impact on racial minority groups. Race serves as the common focal point for this inequity and, as Gooden (2015) argues, such racial inequity is replete across the public policy landscape of the United States. “This means the pattern of racial distribution is mutually compounding and permeates multiple aspects of public policies that significantly affect one’s life chances” (Gooden, 2015, p.  41). Wooldridge and Gooden examined the extent to which such inequities permeate specific public policies. As they note: 

whether the topic is education, housing, employment, health, transportation or poverty, there are two clear and dominate trends: (a) racial minorities tend to fare worse than their white counterparts; (b) those who are in poverty fare worse than the middle class and the wealthy.