Brandi Blessett

A Framework for Integrating Cultural Competency Into the Curriculum of Public Administration Programs

Abstract As the United States increasingly becomes more globalized, diverse, and socially complex, public administration professionals will need to be prepared to lead and manage to meet the changing demands. In order to meet these needs, academic programs responsible for training public service professionals, will need to adopt curricula to promote cultural competency. While other fields have made progress toward promoting cultural competency in curricula, public administration programs have been slow to respond. A multifaceted approach is needed to guide public administration programs toward understanding the purpose of cultural competency education and developing curricula that are responsive to the needs of diverse populations. Drawing from models in healthrelated academic programs, this article introduces the diversity and inclusiveness framework (DIF), with six interdependent components: addressing the program’s mission, identifying core competencies, developing diversity and inclusiveness plans, requiring faculty and staff training, implementing curricular and co-curricular components, and assessing students’ perception of diversity.

Public Administration, Diversity, and the Ethic of Getting Things Done

New public management, in its focus on outcomes and performance, provokes a question on whether there is a value-tradeoff between ethics and performance. The new–old creed of administrators have arguably been focused on a need to produce results—to get things done—to the extent that they could sometimes overlook unethical implications of their actions. This happens at a time when ethicists are looking at ways to emphasize non-teleological ethical reasoning, which creates a problem for public administration. This article uses the case of Overtown, a predominantly African American neighborhood near Downtown Miami that was once dubbed the Harlem of the South, to explore the ethics of administrative actions. Administrative actions, often driven by the pressure to get things done, in Overtown were behind the demise of this neighborhood. The article makes the case for ethics testing to accompany any moves to institutionalize managing-for-results in cases of community development, education, housing, health, and other areas that affect people directly.

Counternarratives as Critical Perspectives in Public Administration Curricula

This article argues for the inclusion of critical perspectives in public administration curricula to explore the historical and contemporary processes that contribute to disparity and injustice. The counternarratives examined in the article include social construction, inclusive feminism, critical urban planning, and democratic cultural pluralism. Critical perspectives or counternarratives are presented as challenges to hegemonic scripts that will aid in creating a workforce that is not only equipped to operate within a global society but understands the economic and social context that operationalize “others” in society.

Sharecropper Finance: Using the Justice System as a Public Revenue Source

Fines and fees charged to lower-income people, mostly African Americans, have long been a mainstay of the revenue stream for the city of Ferguson, Missouri, and other local governments. One outcome of this practice is financial dependency that limits the life-choices of the affected population. This current policy issue shares characteristics with the much older technique of sharecropping, suggesting a long-term pattern of financial exploitation based on race. The authors use a critical race theory framework to examine the question of administrative ethics raised by this practice.

Facilitating Difficult Dialogues in the Classroom: A Pedagogical Imperative

The recent social unrest in the United States, sparked by increased social media attention to the deaths of Black individuals at the hands of police (e.g., “The Counted,” 2016), has led to a national conversation about the issues of institutional racism and racial injustice. This growing conversation has been fostered by the Black Lives Matter movement, which is illuminating these problems for larger segments of the U.S. (and international) community. The Black Lives Matter movement in the United States emerged in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by a self-appointed vigilante, George Zimmerman, and picked up momentum in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in 2014 by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. As explained by activist, and cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter Alicia Garza (2014), “When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity,” and in particular that these are the “consequence of state violence” (para. 12). The creation of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter can be understood as a natural outgrowth of the conversations circulating on #BlackTwitter about systemic state violence against people

To Imagine a World Where All Lives Truly Mattered

Any discussion of All Lives Matter is the antithesis of itself. If all lives truly mattered, the social and political discourse dominating society would not consistently demonize and depict as criminals people and communities of color. State-sanctioned violence, as witnessed by the killings of unarmed Black men, women, and children, would not be justified. The use of force by military personnel to disrupt Native American protesters fighting to protect their history, culture, and, ultimately, their livelihood would be as prominent in the news as the xenophobic messages of political candidates. All Lives Matter is just another attempt to keep people of color in their place, minimizing their lived experiences to effectively retain and hold onto the privileges White supremacy affords Caucasians in the United States. If all lives mattered, the disparity that exists across any number of quality-of-life indicators (e.g., health outcomes, education, employment, income, neighborhood quality, life expectancy, infant mortality) would not so glaringly demonstrate the superfluity by which U.S. society sees and treats people who fall outside of the White, male, heteronormative paradigm. One need not go far back in time to demonstrate the two-faced nature of such an argument, but for all those people who cannot seem to make the connection to the duplicity of the All Lives Matter argument, take a glimpse back into history. The majority of Black people in the United States are well aware of the hypocrisy of democracy. At the country’s founding, when the Declaration of Independence deemed “all men are created equal,” Black men, women, and children were still enslaved, indigenous populations were experiencing genocide, and poor White people, especially women, were not legally recognized as citizens. Actually, the “real” citizens of U.S. society were landowning White males. Herein lies the juxtaposition of U.S. rhetoric versus its reality. The practices of “othering” people of color, women, the differently abled, and people with fluid sexual identities, among “others” were legalized practices and reinforced through discourse, public institutions, and public opinion since the founding of the United States.

Inequality at the Intersection of the Defense of Marriage Act and the Voting Rights Act: A Review of the 2013 Supreme Court Decisions

Two important decisions were made by the Supreme Court of the United States in the summer of 2013. Reactions to the decisions were polarized: Some rejoiced, while others rejected the justices’ rulings. Whereas the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and its allies found satisfaction in the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) decision, communities of color and those sympathetic to the civil rights movement of the 1960s saw an inevitable return to the Jim Crow era in the Voting Rights Act decision. The intention of each decision was to recognize equality, but inequality continues to exist where race, class, and sexuality intersect in the two decisions. Using critical race theory (CRT), this essay explores the inequalities at the intersection of the Supreme Court decisions on DOMA and the Voting Rights Act. Using two of the core tenets of critical race theory, intersectionality and interest convergence, the essay highlights how these civil rights decisions inevitably perpetuated the inequality that they sought to address.