Introduction to the special issue on Whiteness in public administration

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue on Whiteness in public administration begins with a critique on Critical Whiteness Studies and ends with a description of the contributions to the field of public administration presented herein.

Keywords:

• Editor’s Introduction
• Whiteness
• Public Administration
• social justice
• social equity
• race

“High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigues me more than the Souls of White Folk… …The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing,—a 19th and 20th century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national mannequins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth.”

—DuBois, 1920, Ch. 2—

The most common critique of scholars who study Whiteness¹ goes something along the lines of the following: “The focus on Whiteness is strengthening the social construction of race” (Fields & Fields, 2022). This argument is a form of what Wood and Harris (2021) call race-lighting, gas lighting specifically aimed at unraveling support for racial justice. This race-lighting unravels support for racial justice in the same way that bystanders witnessing violent acts unravel support for bodily autonomy (Bar-On, 2001). The bystanders’ indifference is a suggestion that indifference is normal. After centuries of Whiteness being the norm, evasiveness about Whiteness broadcasts the continued authority of that norm.

Yet, the critics’ argument should be taken seriously, not because Whiteness is biological (it is not), nor because it is real (it is not), but exactly because Whiteness is still the norm, still the status quo. Whiteness was adopted to aid the power grab and maintenance begun by colonization and settler colonialism on the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th Century (Du Bois, 1920; Mills 1997; Grosfuguel, 2013). Since then, Whiteness has been contested and violently defended by those allowed to stay in it or win the Faustian bargain that is to promote racism and white supremacy to ultimately enjoy the privilege, power, and immunity Whiteness promises (Mills, 1997; Omi & Winant, 2014). Whiteness has been used to justify the administrative arrangements of economies, politics, and communities (Du Bois, 1920). The history of Whiteness is littered with rapid evolution maintaining racial power, anticipating antiracist tactics by developing new means, methods, and logics (Kendi, 2016; Roediger, 1999; Scott & Leach, 2024). By developing knowledge on Whiteness, could scholars be developing another purchase to implement the next evolution in the centuries-long quest to maintain economic, political, and social power in those who look like the editors of this special issue?

This query is not a research question nor a rhetorical question, but instead the fundamental ambivalence that all who study power, especially racial power, must endure. To abide by Lorde’s (1983) directive to build new tools for dismantling the master’s house requires acknowledging that those new tools may be directed to the master’s purposes, and that the “master” will try to use them. Many racial justice tools have been captured for the use of the powerful. Opponents of racial justice transmogrify the meanings of racial equality tools so that Black Lives Matter and Black Power become All Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and White Power (Schwarz, 2020); the now banned Affirmative Action is co-opted from legislation intended to grant access for people of color to higher eduction to an educational benefit for white people (Nishi, 2022; SFFA v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2020); antiracism becomes a racist control mechanism (Wang, 2024); and the Fourteenth Amendment drafted by the same Congress that mandated federal troops to protect freed people from discrimination in the states becomes a rationale for stopping those same states from protecting people against discrimination (303 CREATIVE LLC v. Elenis, 2023). Whiteness adapts, and the incentive structures are such that the changes best serving the powerful are the most likely retained (Cassano, 2009).

The call for papers for this special issue on theorizing Whiteness in public administration invited researchers to unveil the invisible, not because Whiteness is truly invisible, but because international legal, economic, and social systems benefit when it remains unobserved and under-theorized. With this special issue, the diverse (in rank, epistemology, race, gender, and birth-nation) authors unhesitatingly and unblinkingly observe and theorize Whiteness in governance. In doing so, they have created new tools with which racial justice can be realized, so long as these tools are not allowed to transmogrify into yet more lost opportunities. We, the special issue editors join those authors in choosing to take that risk.

The issue begins with a deep dive into the transmogrification process itself, as Blanco (2024) explores the similarities and differences between the development of Mestizaje identity in Mexico and the theoretical position of Whiteness in the Anglo-American world. This article reveals how the power mechanisms of race operate similarly across geopolitical context, but with important regional differences. After this deep dive into global history by a newer scholar, Love and Stout (2024) contribute a powerful critique that exposes White culture in the “underlying assumptions, values, power dynamics, institutional structures, and procedures” (p. ##) of public administration theory and practice, before offering some new tools for “transformational change” (p. ##). Then, Scott and Leach (2024) conduct theoretical research into understanding how to leverage the history of White Supremacy and the White culture it creates to unveil the logics of Whiteness and how those logics undermine current efforts to promote social equity in public administration.

Each of the next three articles in this issue contextualize Whiteness as a theoretical purchase by providing examples of the kinds of phenomena that are revealed by the focus that Du Bois (1920) proposed from his high tower (Ch. 2). Carter and Rose (2024) use Whiteness as a toe hold to improve the relationship between civic recreation groups like rock climbing organizations and the Native land on which they do their work. Sweeting and John Camara (2024) theorize their work disrupting Whiteness and White normativity within academia. Finally, Feit (2024) gives a methodical and theoretically rigorous account of the need for a better understanding of Whiteness in representative bureaucracy studies.² This research provides an understanding of how Whiteness theory can be leveraged to improve just one small aspect of public administration research, and hints at the broad implications such a focus provides.

We offer this special issue to invite others to explore Whiteness in public administration and as a call for scholars to continue and engage the topic far beyond.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nuri Heckler

Nuri Heckler is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the co-Editor-in-Chief of Administrative Theory & Praxis. His research examining substantive equality and social justice in public organizations including nonprofits, social enterprise, and government can be found in peer-reviewed journals including Administrative Theory & Praxis, Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Public Integrity as well as several books and popular media publications.

Naomi W. Nishi

Naomi W. Nishi, Nishi, PhD is the Assistant Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University. Dr. Nishi is a scholar-practitioner with 20 years’ experience in higher education. Her research, teaching, and work as an Administrator focus on issues of racial equity, social justice, and whiteness in higher education, particularly in STEM, medicine, and higher education policy.

Notes

1 Multiple authors in this issue inquired about how to refer to race and gender categories in response to peer reviewers. Because race is constantly evolving with structural incentives that maintain existing power, language must change or be captured by the dominant power. Therefore, as long as race remains a socially relevant construct, the terms to refer to race will be constantly contested and shifting. In this editorial, we use the proper noun Whiteness to refer to the institution that benefits White people and lowercase whiteness to refer to the European phenotype. We advised authors to provide justification for their terms. Undoubtedly, these constructions will change, and it is the responsibility of researchers to change with them to denote the effort necessary for a commitment to racial justice.

2 A media critique of Stivers’s Bureau Men, Settlement Women by DiStefano (2024) accompanies the special issue providing a notion of where Whiteness scholarship could be in 20 years, while calling for broad and heterodox approaches to developing knowledge.