‘Implicit Bias’ Training Cost Me My Nursing Job

I was fired from my nursing job this year for refusing to take “implicit bias” training. After 39 years of providing equal care to all my patients without regard to their race, I objected to a mandatory course grounded in the idea that I’m racist because I’m white. I fear every healthcare professional will soon be forced to make the same awful decision I did: Falsely admit to being racist or abandon the medical field.

My ordeal started in September 2021 when my employer, Dallas-based Baylor Scott & White Health, rolled out its annual training modules for clinical educators. The list included “Overcoming Unconscious Bias.” After viewing the interactive course, I contacted my supervisor and asked for a meeting with the chief nursing officer and the human resources director. The former sent a surrogate; the latter didn’t attend. After two meetings, it was clear that I wouldn’t be given an exemption. My supervisor told me, “I don’t want you to die on this cross.”

But I did. The idea of implicit bias is grounded in the belief that white people treat those who aren’t white worse than those who are. It’s part of the woke assumption that society, including healthcare, suffers from “systemic racism.” Accordingly, my own supposed implicit bias, which is a euphemism for ingrained racism, must be rooted out. Not only that, it must be replaced with preferential treatment for the nonwhite. {snip}

{snip} When I tried to find a new healthcare job, no one would hire me. No doubt if they contacted my old employer, they were told why I was let go.

States are increasingly requiring implicit-bias training as a condition for obtaining medical and nursing licenses. As of July, the Kentucky Board of Nursing requires that all registered nurses take a continuing-education course on implicit bias. In July, as a journalistic exercise, I paid $5 and signed up for the recommended course, created by the Kentucky Nurses Association. Nurses are told that “implicit bias kills,” and that white privilege is a “covert” form of racism. The course walks nurses through their possible contributions to “modern-day lynchings in the workplace.”

{snip}