Addressing Whiteness in Nursing Education

Abstract

This article describes a project designed to change the climate of whiteness in academic nursing. Using an emancipatory, antiracist perspective from whiteness studies, we describe a project that helped faculty and staff to work together to challenge and begin to change the status quo of unnamed white privilege and racial injustice in nursing education.

Using an Intersectional Approach to Study the Impact of Social Determinants of Health for African American Mothers Living With HIV

“…The evidence could then be used to advocate for structural interventions aimed at altering imbalances of power, such as the provision of micro-financing programs to reduce economic inequality 1 or antiracist education to challenge and change the unmarked white privilege of the US healthcare system. 47 …”

Discourses with potential to disrupt traditional nursing education: Nursing teachers’ talk about norm‐critical competence

“…It is important that nursing students critique the taken-for-granted reference point against which patients are measured and that they be aware of the mechanisms underlying unequal relationships in society and health-care (Boutain, 2005). One way inequalities are created is through the construction of an unquestioned "normality," as opposed to different "others" (Kumashiro, 2000), in the form of white, middle-class, female nursing (Schroeder & DiAngelo, 2010). The three discourses revealed the teachers' unawareness of this antithetical relationship.…”

“…Conceptions of the "normal" are thereby reproduced, and a discursive order of normality continues to guide the education of nursing students. Schroeder and DiAngelo (2010) concluded that an ongoing retreat from the discomfort of authentic racial engagement results in a perpetual cycle that serves to keep racism in place. This can be transferred to the present study: it would be easy to refrain from questioning restricting norms just because doing so is uncomfortable.…”

“…However, this has not been done systematically, and studies identify several types of normativity in nursing education in, for example, the UK, the United States, Canada, and Sweden. "Whiteness" normativity has been described in various contexts, reflecting whiteness as the dominant norm (Allen, 2006;Hagey & MacKay, 2000;Schroeder & DiAngelo, 2010).…”

“…In line with this reasoning, attempts have been made to transform nursing education: for example, in Canada, the education of community health nurses has been transformed to meet equity and human rights demands (Falk-Rafael & Betker, 2012). To change the climate of whiteness in academic nursing, one American university initiated a project with an emancipatory, antiracist perspective in which participants analysed power dynamics to foster a climate of diversity in their workplace (Schroeder & DiAngelo, 2010). Clark et al (2011) describe an educational change, initiated by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, based on the fact that nursing is being challenged to meet the needs of ethnically and socioculturally diverse populations.…”