By Rachel K. Walker, July 23, 2020, Medium.
In recent weeks, professional nursing organizations such as ANA, AACN, Sigma Nursing, ONS, AAN, APHA and NLN released statements of solidarity voicing an “[end] hatred, discrimination, and racism in every form.”
Some of these organizational statements were more direct than others. Practically none but the Nursology Theory Collective provided a description of specific resource investments or other steps being taken towards greater accountability to Black communities and commitment to active, on-going anti-racist nursing praxis. Notably, ANA’s statement from Dr. Ernest Grant spoke from his own first-person perspective, as a nurse leader and Black man in America who [has] “not been exempt from negative experiences with racism and discrimination.” ANA’s member assembly subsequently adopted a “Resolution on Racial Justice for Communities of Color” on June 20, 2020.
Almost none of the statements by major professional nursing organizations acknowledged nursing’s long history and on-going complicity in upholding structural racism and white supremacy. In fact, many statements from nursing institutions were almost completely ahistorical, as if the centuries-old emergency of racial injustice and other oppressions in the United States and beyond had only just arrived on the scene.
But eventually, as entries authored by extremely well-intentioned, clinically-experienced, and almost exclusively white women nurses with phrases from institutional dress code policies like “natural hair color” “piercings” “tattoos” and “fake eyelashes” … “ARE NOT ALLOWED” justified with words like “research” and “patient safety” and “infection risk” piled up, I couldn’t ignore it any longer. The situation was rapidly becoming bystanderism.
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