Life happens as a series of simultaneous experiences for everyone over time. It’s amazing if you think about it. So many things are happening in this moment. And this moment. And this moment. The experiences of some are close to us, the experiences of others are much farther away. Some experiences involve many others, some involve only a few. At some level you and I are inextricably connected. We are an ‘us’.
As you read the words on your screen the horizons of your experience and mine, potentially change you, while writing these words potentially changes me. My horizon encompasses my experiences, my perspectives. There are many things that shape it. As the world shifts and moves, I shift and move. The shifts and moves make me feel increasingly uncomfortable about the social injustice that happens. On a day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute level nothing has changed externally in a dramatic way. The changes that are happening are my increased awareness and understanding.
Over the past weeks, following my re-reading of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and getting really deep into nursing theory I have begun to think more about applications of nursing theory in broader sense than the traditional realm of healthcare specific spaces like hospitals (which, let’s be honest, many may think is the only nursing space). Nursing is the frame by which nurses view the world, by which they study the world; it’s how they know the world. This might not be so explicit and foregrounded. It should be.
It’s like a before and after. But it’s murky if the frame isn’t consciously drawn. It makes it harder to know what exactly you are looking at; is it a duck or is it a lady? Weaving the framework of transformative learning as conceptualized by Jack Mezirow with the emancipatory and action-oriented process of co-creation of the learning experience as a process of love of humanity made me think about weaving those same processes with theories like Human Becoming and Interpersonal Relations. The nursing theory is a theory of humans and health but also theory of humans and inter-connectedness. I’m super into this idea of dialogue and the notion that in nursing there is no you and I, there is only a we because nursing is at the very least, and inherently, a dyad, an ‘us’.
So here I am, thinking about racism, the criminal justice system, and the connection to substance use, addiction, mental health, mental illness and how this all plays out in our systems so deeply entrenched in systemic and institutionalized racism. And so, my belief that all undergraduate nursing programs should have anti-racism as a central feature in their curriculum development knowing what we know and how it has played out over the last 100 years. I don’t want to be a the nurse who helps normalize someone into understanding and accepting the social injustice in their life that has resulted in perpetual trauma. I want to be the nurse that changes the system so that people aren’t perpetually excluded and traumatized by a structure drenched in inequity.
What is the role of nurses and nursing in anti-racist action?
This is what I read in the middle of the night when I could not fall asleep after listening to The New Jim Crow (I recommend it if you haven’t read it, and I hope you are as unsettled by it as I was):
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/jf-pf/2019/may01.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4394712/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4873227/
Peace,
Michelle D.
nursingforsocialjustice 
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