Neoliberal ideology and exclusionary policies based on racialized identities characterize the current contexts in North America and Western Europe. Nursing knowledge cannot be abstracted from social, political and historical contexts; the task of examining the influence of race and racial ideologies on disciplinary knowledge and inquiry therefore remains an important task. Contemporary analyses of the role and responsibility of the discipline in addressing race-based health and social inequities as a focus of nursing inquiry remain underdeveloped. In this article, we examine nursing's engagement with ideas about race and racism and explore the ways in which nursing knowledge and inquiry have been influenced by race-based ideological discourses.Drawing on Henry and Tator's framework of democratic racism, we consider how strategic discursive responses-the discourses of individualism, multiculturalism, colourblindness, political correctness and denial-have been deployed within nursing knowledge and inquiry to reinforce the belief in an essentially fair and just society while avoiding the need to acknowledge the persistence of racist discourses and ideologies. Greater theoretical, conceptual and methodological clarity regarding race, racialization and related concepts in nursing inquiry is needed to address health and social inequities. K E Y W O R D Sdiscourse, health inequities, multiculturalism, nursing, nursing knowledge, racism

This research study shows how race becomes ascribed through nursing theory and day-to-day workplace socialization processes. We show how public health nurses supporting and promoting breastfeeding for new mothers learn about and reproduce racialized stereotypes, which shape the care they provide. Even when nurses attempt to actively resist racialized stereotypes, most participate in essentialized nursing practice by using racialized institutional practices. Nursing theory needs to expand to help the nurse navigate and understand both the nurses' and client's local histories as well as individual-to-systems level constraints and supports that may impede, or promote, a mother's ability to breastfeed.