Kentucky Requires Nurses to Take Training on ‘Structural Racism’ and ‘White-Splaining’

The Kentucky Board of Nursing mandated nurses to take an ” implicit bias ” course to “recognize the history of racism in healthcare” and threatened “discipline” for failure to do so.

The ultimatum to complete the “mandatory continuing education” training, which was developed by the Kentucky Nurses Association , forced nurses to complete the training by July 1.

“They pretty much said we’re all guilty of being racist, and we need to examine the way that we take care of patients and change our behaviors because we are giving substandard care,” Rebecca Wall, a Kentucky certified registered nurse anesthetist with 40 years experience, told the Washington Examiner.

The training , presented by KNA Board of Directors Treasurer Arica Brandford and KNA CEO Delanor Manson, told nurses that “best intentions will not solve implicit bias in healthcare.”

“In order to lead to meaningful change, any exploration of implicit bias must be situated as part of a much larger conversation on racism and bias,” an opening slide of the presentation states.

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Laura Morgan, a nurse of 39 years and program manager at the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, told the Washington Examiner that “discipline” could mean the non-renewal of a license.

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A diagram of “overt racism” and “covert racism” was included in one slide that suggests a white woman asking a black woman where she is from is “covert racism.”

Examples of “overt racism” include lynching, painting swastikas, and “public harassment of [persons of color] speaking other than English.”

“Covert racism” includes “white silence,” “denying institutional racism,” saying “there’s only one human race,” denying white privilege, “bootstrap theory,” “Eurocentric school curricula,” “weaponizing whiteness,” “fetishizing POC,” “claiming ‘reverse racism,'” “excusing/ ‘white-splaining’ racism,” and many more.

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Morgan said the American Nurses Association, KNA’s parent organization, reoriented itself toward this ideology in 2020 due to the Black Lives Matter riots and the presidential terms of Ernest Grant from 2018 to 2022.

“He started taking the ANA on a sharp left turn,” Morgan said. The ANA issued a ” racial reckoning statement ” that “talks about all the permanent harm nurses have done throughout the years to their patients,” Morgan said.

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