Featuring Rose Roach, executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association:
How are nurses of color impacted by racism, both on the job and in the streets? Could using weapons of war against protesters increase the spread of coronavirus? Code WACK! host Brenda Gazzar and Rose Roach, executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association, discuss the concerns nurses have today, as America struggles against both a pandemic and its racist past.
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Nurses, Racism & Black Lives Matter Protests
—– TRANSCRIPT —–
Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today, we’ll talk about nurses, racism and the George Floyd protests.
Rose Roach is the executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association, an affiliate of National Nurses United.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Rose.
Roach: Thank you for having me.
Q: A lot has been happening in Minneapolis. How has the death of George Floyd, an African American, at the hands of a white police officer and the subsequent protests affected nurses there?
Roach: So, nurses of color themselves experience racism and they worry for their family’s safety every single day. They experience racism at work, where they are often treated differently by their coworkers. They’re passed over for opportunities their white co-workers with less experience or seniority received and they are often more likely to be disciplined than their fellow white nurses. The nurses in hospitals near the fires and violent crackdown on peaceful protesters have been working in a heightened state of anxiety. They’ve been worried about their safety going to and from work but they have also been participating in community cleanup efforts. They’re serving on medic teams to help injured protesters and donating much-needed supplies to the communities that are impacted.
Wow, interesting.
Roach: I do want to mention that a few years ago MNA developed a racial diversity committee because we knew we needed to mentor new leadership into our union so that the face of MNA reflected the community of the nurses in Minnesota and we also wanted to center nurses in the racial equity and justice movement as they are centered in the healthcare justice movement. So we are also working with a company that was created and is owned and run by black, brown and LGBTQ people called Team Dynamics to do the work necessary that brings about changing the overall culture of the union with a focus on anti-racism, understanding and recognizing inherent bias and how white union leaders and members must be allies for nurses of color and confront racism when they see it.
Q: Hmm. So, I’m curious. Are there people of color at the highest levels of union leadership right now?
Roach: There are. When we started the Racial Diversity Committee there weren’t as many and through the work of that committee and trainings for our members and reaching out specifically to nurses of color, we had some openings at the highest levels of the union soon after that committee got up and running and started doing some of its work and for the first time in the history of the union 40% of all of the members that applied for positions and appointments to those highest-level positions were people, nurses of color.
Q: Rose, why do you think that’s important to have people of color at the highest levels of union leadership?
Roach: I think particularly for the nurses, the nurses care for the community, right? And it makes no difference what color you are, what your religion is, what your socioeconomic status is, nurses care for patients and the patient community is, of course, very diverse so it is important that the community sees a reflection of themselves in union leadership and empowering people of color to lead us — particularly in a time like now — is critically important so we have put a real emphasis and a priority on doing that work from the union perspective.
Q: Got it. Have the protests directly affected the work of nurses in Minneapolis hospitals?
Roach: So far we haven’t had any real specific examples that have been brought forward to us but we do know, of course, that using weapons of war which our National Nurses United came out saying that with a strong statement opposing utilizing tear gas and rubber bullets and flash grenades because of the health hazards that go along with that, particularly of course in a time of a pandemic when you’re looking at tear gas which impacts respiratory but also causes you to touch your face, your eyes, your nose, your mouth. So the nurses are having to treat, in some instances, people who have been injured with the rubber bullets or have experienced any other injuries from these types of weapons that have been used against the peaceful protesters.
Q: So there’s a social justice movement happening at the same time that there’s a pandemic where people are supposed to be physically distancing. How do you feel about all of that?
Roach: Yeah, well nurses are, of course, concerned that the number of protesters, that there are a number of them that are unmasked or not socially distancing but nurses are also mothers and fathers and they understand that if you feared everyday that your child might be murdered by law enforcement and the only way to change that paradigm was to hit the streets right now anything and everything else might become a secondary concern or thought. We know that the community organizers are doing everything they can to advance safety protocols, to address the concerns about the virus. MNA is actually in the process of working with the leaders of the various protests to set up [free COVID] testing sites with nurses volunteering to staff those sites as they are beginning to hear that some of the organizers are exhibiting symptoms.
I would like to point out we just received an open letter from almost 1,300 public health infectious disease professionals and community stakeholders from across the country that states white supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.
That’s right. They also say they don’t condemn these gatherings as risky in terms of COVID-19 but support them as a vital tool to the National Public Health and specifically to the threatened health of black people in the U.S.
Thank you, Rose.
Find more Code WACK! episodes at ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen at heal-ca.org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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