Resistance or reinforcement? A critical discourse analysis of racism and anti-Blackness in public administration scholarship

Abstract

This article identifies the ways that White supremacy manifests throughout the field of public administration in its research and scholarship. Through a critical discourse analysis of symposia over a period of 20 years (2000–2020) in three foremost public administration journals, this paper investigates the extent to which each journal either reinforces or resists systemic racism. Peer-reviewed journals serve as gatekeepers to advancing and shaping the direction of research; as such, symposia are a mechanism through which editors signal interest, create intellectual space, open dialogue in a particular research direction, and share editorial power with guest editors who either represent marginalized or hegemonic identities and positions. Our analysis reveals there is an opportunity to enhance race-consciousness, intentional anti-racist language, power-sharing, and resistance in future symposia. The article concludes by offering a path forward toward dismantling, reconciling, and repairing the entrenched, systemic, and historic racism and anti-Blackness in the field of public administration.

Keywords:

• Anti-racist public administration
• critical discourse analysis
• resistance

Notes

1 The authors chose to capitalize the “w” in White and the “b” in Black to draw attention to the lived experiences and positionalities which the social construction of “race” affords to people; in turn determining their accessibility (or lack of it) of public services (see Ewing, 2020; Yanow, 2003).