The nursing organizations that purport to represent the entire profession repeatedly and resolutely refuse to sharpen their political analysis, refuse to walk what they so readily talk, and I am furious. Furious about the death of colleague and comrade Alex Pretti. I am furious that substantive responses from my discipline to the Trump administration’s terrorism are predicated on objective violence against a nurse, particularly when the quotidian violence has escalated continuously. In this, I recognize a historical pattern in the professionalized discipline of nursing: like Alex Pretti, nurses have shown up for the people, while nursing shows up too late, inert and ineffective. This is not accidental. Instead, by choosing late engagement and a politics of neutrality, nursing shores up proximity to white, patriarchal power while mobilizing the moral cache of gendered carework.
As I think through the issues at hand, I want to draw a distinction between how I am using nursing and what I mean by nurses. When I use “nurse,” I refer to individual nurses. When I say “nursing,” I mean the assemblage of professionalized nursing organizations that govern and regulate the discipline and profession, like the American Nurses Association (ANA) and the American Academy of Nursing, as well as other institutions that comprise the healthcare-industrial complex. This assemblage of systems, structures, and institutions seems impossible to change, a convenient imaginary that stops radical transformation before it starts. In the following discussion, I reflect on how nurses show up and how, both historically and in the present, nursing lets us down.
When I say nurses show up, I am talking about Marie Branch. In 1972, Branch reported in Nursing Forum on her trip to the People’s Republic of China as part of the Black Panther Party delegation, connecting health practices observed there to critical needs of the American people. By the time she traveled to China, Branch had already launched a Panther-led community clinic in Southern California and was leading antiracist nursing education research. Branch’s influence reached ANA by way of its Cabinet for Human Rights. In a 1975 report on Affirmative Action in nursing, Branch offered a critique of the organization’s progress toward racial equity, noting “serious concerns about the status of affirmative action with ANA today” and citing a record of inaction. In 1978, led by efforts from the Cabinet, ANA adopted a justice-oriented “Position Statement on Nursing and Health Needs for Ethnic People of Color,” which advocated for a “multifaceted approach […] to correct the injustices that exist in the health care system,” reflecting terminology introduced to nursing by Branch. Though the organization adopted progressive positions in the 1970s, reflecting broader social and political attitudes, particularly in the Cabinet for Human Rights, ANA shifted toward a more corporate structure and politics in the 1980s. While the Cabinet for Human Rights was a generative space for progressive thinking in the 1970s, that eroded in the 1980s, and its mission was folded together with ANA ethics initiatives to form the Center for Ethics and Human Rights in the 1990s.