The Issue of Systemic Racism
Social justice requires mutual respect. So easy to say: so challenging to do. Always challenging. All the time. None more so than now as the reality of historic systemic racism becomes real in the US.
In nursing, social justice is an embedded value professed to in the writing of our legacy leaders. However, systemic racism now shows up just as clearly and just as embedded. It shows up as systemic racism from the legacy of Nightingale in Crimea to the present in employment and education systems. It has been implicitly understood and accepted in the covenant nursing has with society… That nurses take care of all persons who come into their care. The ANA Code of Ethics says it this way:
The principles that human beings have inherent, intrinsic, and unconditional worth, in and of themselves, and should be valued as such: that is, all persons should be treated with respect simply because they are persons.
Respect is such a simple word. What does it look like in real life? The very basic and challenging action step is to listen to each other without judgment regardless of similarities or differences. Learning to listen/hear while suspending judgment is not easy. Pre-judging is what makes it difficult. Pre-judice consists of thoughts and feelings, including stereotypes, attitudes, and generalizations that are based on little or no experience and then are projected to everyone from that group. All humans have prejudice: we cannot avoid it (Pg. 19 white Fragility.) It is a way we make sense of other groups.
It is the judgements that cause the problem. When a difference in culture, skin color, language or any other characteristic or feature results in a good/bad, or positive/negative evaluation and it is judged to be better or worse than some standard injustice is initiated. Acceptance without judgment. Easy to say, hard to do. Social justice requires mutual respect. Easy to say, hard to do. What does respect look like? It looks like non-judgmental acceptance of another’s beliefs, values, customs and traditions, and all other differences regardless of how strange or odd they seem.
In Values for a New Millennium, Robert Humphrey explains that mutual respect is based on The Natural Law, which he defines as the fact that every human being has the same drive or need to preserve self, family, and species. This is an immutable truth of human nature, whether we are talking about a very complex community of highly educated people with extraordinary wealth or a very simple society without written language and with few physical resources or possessions. The drive or need to preserve self, family and species is exactly the same. Humphrey believes that recognizing this fundamental equality of all humans is the justifiable foundation for mutual respect. He further points out that many of the Individual and societal differences among humans that have evolved over time can be traced to environmental or climatic variations around the world.
Sometimes we don't know what we don’t know. In recent years, the term implicit (or unconscious) bias has been helping people with white skin understand how the reality of white privilege makes us complicit in the racial disparities that plague America. For many people with white skin, the idea of having ‘privilege ‘is difficult to comprehend. Especially those on the lower rungs of the social status ladder. Even for people in the middle class coming to grips with the meaning of white privilege often seems too difficult to comprehend, let alone accept. It makes people angry. The fact is that our society as a whole is based on an understanding that “white skin is better than brown/black skin” It took me a long time and many discussions and reading to finally accept this truth. About me and about others. Respect is key to social justice. For civilization to live up to its heritage, system racism needs to be dismantled. The color of a person’s skin can no longer mean white skinned people are of higher value than people whose skin is another color. White color is not better than brown or black. This is what Social Justice looks like.
Richard Oldling Beard founded the University of Minnesota School of Nursing in 1909. He thought so highly of nursing he was nicknamed the “Nestor of Nurses” (Greek mythology) His vision about nursing’s potential contribution to improving world health and world peace were quite boundless. He saw how the value of ‘care for all regardless’ led him to see nursing as having a major impact on social justice.
