Advancing Racial Justice and Diversity Through Equity and Inclusion

What better time than now for academic nursing to look critically and intentionally at how the profession addresses racism? The National Commission to Address Racism in Nursing (American Nurses Association [ANA], 2021) announced a call for immediate action earlier this year. The Commission’s focus is to explore racism within nursing, and the impact racism has on individuals, communities, and health care systems. The press release stated, “nursing has a long history of institutional inequities, classism, and racism as evidenced by the low percentage of non-White nurses and less than 1% of deans and chief nursing administrators coming from diverse backgrounds.” As African Americans who are registered nurses working in academic nursing, we have grown accustomed to being a part of an underrepresented group in predominantly White institutions. Still, we have often wondered why so few people look like us in academic nursing. This fact says a lot about exclusivity rather than the inclusivity of the profession. The critical question posed by Njie-Carr et al. (2020, p. 5) in the book, “Disparities in the Academy: Accounting for the Elephant,” “why is it that nursing in the U.S., which according to decades of Gallup Polls, is rated the most ethical profession, but has not yet become a more racially and ethnically diverse profession that includes, in particular, substantially more Black faculty, in predominantly White Schools of Nursing? Why is it?”