Racism in the workplace

Nurses General Nursing

Published

Not to be a downer or anything but I have noticed some harsh things said about patients and sometimes even co workers in my unit when they think no one else can hear them. Has anyone else dealt with this?

Specializes in L&D, QI, Public Health.
America has a very violent racist history and it will stay in America...You cannot change anything about it...The history is there and history always repeats itself, whether you like it or not!!

Yes, you're right. Let's give up. Back to people making disrespectful snide and overt remarks without people calling them out on it. Wait a minute, that's not good enough. Why don't we start labeling fountains again.

I mean, c'mon. It's people like you who allow this stuff pass through generations and generations by your defeatist attitude.

I don't know you, but I'm sure you wouldn't allow someone to step all over you awake or in your sleep and I'm not going to either.

As for some people of color 'crying wolf', yes, it happens. I'm not going to deny in the least, but I don't feel that they're the majority or the rule. It's totally wrong and doesn't help me out nor them at all.

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What would you do if you felt that you were not being granted an interview because your name was "foreign" or obviously insinuated a particular religion or race?? I am so tempted to call up the HR dept and call them on it. I have applied to 1 hospital for over 2 years as a CNA or Unit Secretary and have never been called by the HR rep. The positions remain open for months. I know that I have the experience, educational background and skills but am CERTAIN that is discrimination. I am extremely frustrated and am increasingly angry.

Call the Attorney General and tell them! They are the ones who would handle a case like that (I believe)

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America has a very violent racist history and it will stay in America...You cannot change anything about it...The history is there and history always repeats itself, whether you like it or not!!

Boy! I am glad that people like MLK and other civil rights activists didn't feel this way. You have to fight for change...not throw up your hands in defeat.

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Specializes in mostly in the basement.

I have a thought that's pretty much off-topic and yet related somehow. I was just talking to my BF about this today. Feel free to stone me because I already feel pretty bad about it but it "is what it is"

Background--grew up a CA liberal/PC/schooled in diversity/supporter of social programs/education/blah, blah...

I have been working in an inner-city ED for just about a year. I now think I am BECOMING racist. I don't need to give examples but the absolute worst stereotypes are being played out pretty much every shift. By all? No. But enough to where I just realized yesterday that I think I am getting resentful.

I already know, time to change the scenery...I'm already burnt out---for my sake and my patients. Just wanted to throw that out.

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I am a white woman from the North of England, yet I have experienced 'racism' when I moved down to the South. A charge nurse from Maritus asked one of the CNA's in my ear shot 'Where is that Northern Monkey". How do you deal with that one.

That actually does happen. I grew up in Louisiana but, I don't sound "southern" so I was called names like that ... even though I actually was from there.

I never fit into the south. I left many years ago.

:typing

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Specializes in RN, BSN, CHDN.
That actually does happen. I grew up in Louisiana but, I don't sound "southern" so I was called names like that ... even though I actually was from there.

I never fit into the south. I left many years ago.

:typing

You know I have had people talk to me slowly just in case I dont understand them:idea: I have said to them I am from the North I am not stupid I do speak English thank you very much :trout: :lol2:

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Specializes in Critical Care.

Tamar Jacoby, from the book, "Someone Else's House", discussing the 1965 book "Black Ghetto" by Integrationist and Psychologist Kenneth Clark:

"Clark's central metaphor for segregation was a prison or concentration camp, and as he saw things, the long, enforced isolation had wreaked so much psychological havoc that many blacks had lost the capacity to seek their way out. Though careful not to blame the victim, he spared nothing in his description of this "racial damage": a combination of defeatism and impotent anger that, he said, made blacks suspicious, predatory, and continually resentful and left them ill-equipped to compete in the mainstream. Each individual was trapped by a "core of doubt" - a belief in his own inferiority and "the pervasive failure of his group." Many were so bitter that they would not even try to do well in the white world: to them, success seemed humiliating - a kind of betrayal to the race - because it meant seeking white approval and submitting to standards used in the past, to keep blacks back. Even his own accomplishments, Clark admitted, felt like treachery. What he feared was that, even when white resistance disappeared, the black man's "own inner anxieties" would hinder his movement into the mainstream."

See, I like this book so far. The writer is suggesting that racial relationships is a sort of 'meeting in the middle'. But, the different groups, as a result of our social legacies, have difficulty reaching out to a common middle ground. We are, to put it bluntly, a dysfunctional family. And each of us has our own reasons for simply not talking.

There's lots of emotional and social 'baggage' still lying around.

So, just like the sister, or brother, or parent that so many haven't spoken with in 10 yrs, it's just easier to forget that there is even an issue to worry about. That doesn't make the hurt and the estrangement go away. It just means you don't have to deal with it for the moment.

That moment has been the last 20, no 30, yrs in our history.

The greatest accomplishment of the Civil Rights movement was to make bigotry ugly. It has been driven underground. The majority of whites might still hold residual bigotries, but most recognize them for what they are: undesirable and wrong.

The next stage, if you ask me, has to be the same intolerance for black 'defeatism'. We must attack that just as equally and ferociously as we are bigotry. Calling a child 'oreo' for doing well in school is simply intolerable. Our next generation has to be taught differently then excelling in school is caving in to 'the man'.

Most social scientists will say there is progress here: there is a growing black middle and upper class EXACTLY because many are surpassing these 'internal' boundaries. But, at the same time, many are being left behind, mired in a sub-culture that preaches that the only real successes are anti-educational: pro sports, music careers, and 'pimping'. Just listen to a rap song or two. It's an expression of anger, yes, but also a clear expression of the problem.

If 'the system' holds no hope for someone, how will they EVER integrate into that system? We must dispel the notion that 'the system' is a white man's world. After all, MLK's biggest contribution was his insistence that 'the system' be colorblind, an equal avenue for all that could be equally accessed by all.

The gulfs that still hinder us must and can only be closed by claiming and advocating for fostering the hope that lies in believing in 'equal access'. It's not enough to merely work to make it a reality; we have to work to make it believable - not just by those that have benefited from the successes of the past and handed down those social mores to their children - but for those that don't have those advantages, as well.

The crux of the 'American Dream' is nothing more then the BELIEF in individual empowerment.

~faith,

Timothy.

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Specializes in Case mgmt., rehab, (CRRN), LTC & psych.
I grew up in Louisiana but, I don't sound "southern" so I was called names like that ... even though I actually was from there.

I never fit into the south. I left many years ago.

I've recently moved to Texas after spending a short lifetime in California and people are always asking me, "Where are you from? You sound funny." I personally believe I am asked this question because I'm a black female who speaks proper English and, therefore, is 'white-sounding'. The locals around here expect all black people to have Southern drawls, which is not the case.
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Specializes in Case mgmt., rehab, (CRRN), LTC & psych.
I have been working in an inner-city ED for just about a year. I now think I am BECOMING racist. I don't need to give examples but the absolute worst stereotypes are being played out pretty much every shift.
I work at a long-term care facility in a large metropolitan area in Texas and, yes, I see certain stereotypes ans statistics come to life with my CNAs. Virtually all of the CNAs are young, black unwed mothers with several children fathered by multiple men. Many collect food stamps because they have offered to sell them to me and the other nurses. They brag about the housing assistance they receive from the state. One of my former aides, a 29 year old woman, had five children and one grandchild.

I'm a young black female who was born on the West Coast and raised with an open mind. I still have an open mind.

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Specializes in geri, med/surg, neuro critical care.
I used to work with a (White) nurse who was not only openly racist towards Blacks and Hispanics, but she seemed to hate everybody who was not middle-class and WASP. She made comments all the time about "white trash", "junkie low-life" and she was borderline abusive to some of the elderly with dementia. She was so confident that she had a right to treat people any way she wanted that she bragged about it. Basically she was a bully who went after anyone she perceived as powerless. I got in her face after I caught her telling a little old lady to "shut up" and that she was disturbing the other patients with her constant moaning. I knew that the lady was mourning because she got the news while in the hospital that her adult daughter died of cancer. For my confrontational attitude, I got "angry nurse" label. What really upsets me is that she was allowed to retire a couple of years later at her leisure. Apparently everyone else gave her a pass. It happens.

:angryfire :angryfire :angryfire :angryfire :angryfire :angryfire :angryfire

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Specializes in Infection Preventionist/ Occ Health.

One of the nurses who was precepting me this summer was pretty much openly racist towards African-Americans. She did not call them any names, but she treated her minority clients very differently than her white clients. She made a comment about the fact that one of her African-American patients was pregnant for the fifth time (why did that matter to her?), made reference to the fact that the patient would most likely be a complainer before she even went into the room, and finally made a comment to me and the HUC that "they are coming out here more and more, we don't want them, why don't they just go to St. ____ "(a hospital in the city).

She also said to me and the HUC "Just guess, what percentage of them do you think are on Medicaid?" Luckily, the HUC wasn't going to give her a free pass on that one. He said "I'm not going to go there", meaning that he was not going to participate in that kind of conversation.

When I asked this nurse why she thought this patient would be a complainer, she said "because they all are"! Boy did the nurse feel stupid when the patient responded "I feel much better, thank you" after being given pain medication.

When I tried to bring this (and other behaviors I noticed on the floors) up to my clinical instructor, she said "well, you can't call that racism".

I have noticed that people from my mother's generation (such as these two nurses) have the impression that its ok to make subtle racist remarks among themselves as long as they don't say them out in the open. Most of them are very defensive when you point out to them that their comments are of a prejudicial nature, and will swear up and down that they are not in fact racist.

I think that there is some hope for my generation, but we still have a long way to go.

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- Too bad people forget that NONE of us are true americans- only American Indians can say "go back to where you came from".

Even the Native Americans came over here from elsewhere.....

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