People should be fired if mentally ill people are afraid of them because of their race? That’s nothing more than an “accomodation” in your mind?
My maternal grandmother was like this woman. She lived her whole life in the deep south, raised in rural Louisiana in the 30’s, bone deep racist and once freaked out when I took her to the hopsital for some ailment or other (she was in her 60’s at the time) and a black doctor came into examine her. She refused to “let a black man put his hands on me.” They gave her a different doctor (it was still Louisiana, and racism was still very alive and overt in Lousiana in the 80’s, so her behavior was not seen as particularly unusual and “accomodations” were made).
I apologized over and over again to anyone that would listen, but the black doctor shrugged it off and said it wasn’t the first time that had happened. I chewed her out on the way back, telling her I thought her behavior was disgraceful. She just kept saying “it’s how I was raised” (as if that has any fucking meaning at all), and she wasn’t going to change.
She wasn’t mentally, ill. She wasn’t subjected to any undue stress. She was just a bigot. She stayed a bigot until the day she died. That’s not all she ever was, by any means, but it was an inseparable part of who she was and it kept me from ever really being able to love her all the way. Her friends were like that too, and a lot of my other family down there (though never my parents). I’m well-acquainted with that kind of old-timer , deep south racism and I do not feel the slightest bit of distress for them if they can’t handle a person of color giving them help that they need. I certainly can’t go along with any notion that bigotry ever needs to be “accomodated,” and it’s beyond the pale if an employer fires somebody because the customers don’t like what color they are.
Anyway, your anecdote is different from Laudenum’s. His grandma was gripped by fear, yours was gripped by hatred, yada yada yada… all the more reason to to take instances like this on a case-by-case basis. If the residence can accommodate without too much trouble, fine. If they can’t, then the patient (to the extent the patient is able) and the patient’s family should seek accommodations elsewhere.
Now go ahead and tell me I’m pining for apartheid.
Sigh. People are allowed to be racist. That’s a right given by the First Amendment. You cannot take that away without weakening it. The government and certain businesses cannot, and that’s the limit it should have. Allowing laws to enter people’s minds is the very definition of “slippery slope.”
As sad as it may be, we must protect the First Amendment: no law may dictate what people think.
Sigh. People are allowed to be racist. That’s a right given by the First Amendment. You cannot take that away without weakening it. The government and certain businesses cannot, and that’s the limit it should have. Allowing laws to enter people’s minds is the very definition of “slippery slope.”
As sad as it may be, we must protect the First Amendment: no law may dictate what people think.
First off, for all my previous comments I wasn’t aware the nurse was fired. Because of the article, I had assumed the worst the nurse suffered was not being able to help this one patient and knowing some people out there hate her because of her skin color. If she was indeed fired due to being the wrong color, then that is clearly discrimination. Now if that was the reason or not is a different question, but it’s a fair situation to leave in the courts hands.
The other thing I’m noticing, everyone is looking at this as a business. Should the business discriminate, should a business accommodate racist customers, etc. Try looking at it from a different perspective for a moment. Her room is where she lives, most likely until the day she dies. All of her possessions are there. Her previous home was probably sold to pay for the nursing home. Most of her time (if not all) is spent there. That room is, in effect, this woman’s home. After all, the word ‘home’ is right there in the phrase ‘nursing home’ that we’ve all been using.
Which means there’s a fairly large element of should someone be forced into accepting others in their home that they don’t want, for whatever reason? Does being sick and unable to live on your own mean you must give up your freedom of association? Should a person have no input over who enters their living space? Even in other communal living situations, like college dorms, an individual has the right to decide who will and won’t enter their room. Why should a nursing home patient not have that same right?
So on one hand, it is a company and as such should follow the same laws on racial discrimination as other companies. OTOH, this isn’t as simple as ‘it’s a business, deal with it’ like many replies here have indicated. It’s also people’s living space and should be treated with the same sensitivity that you might expect if you had no control over who walked into your bedroom while you were lying there helplessly.
Which is why my very first post on the topic mentioned making a distinction between the company discriminating and the old geezer discriminating. If the company discriminates, nail them to the wall. If the old woman discriminates, that may not be nice but it also shouldn’t be punished by the law.
I was following you (not agreeing, but at least trying to get some understanding) up to this point. By bringing in college dorms, you again muddy the waters. A dorm dweller can of course say, “I do not want to share a room with this individual because he stinks/doesn’t clean up his part of the room/is too loud/etc.” But a college will be in a risky business if it starts accomodating racist rooming requests. I’m not sure about my conservative undergrad institutition (bless its cold-blooded heart), but I’m certain the commie-pinko, liberal bastion university were I did my graduate work would have said, “Don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split ya!” if a racist came into the resident director’s office ranting about “niggers”, “whiteys”, “kikes”, or “spics” invading “their” space.
If you want to take on another example, let’s say that instead of a nursing home, we were talking about a hostel, where people might be sharing living space with 3-4 other strangers. Do you think the hostel is responsible for ensuring that a racist person isn’t roomed with someone from a group on their personal shit list? I just filled out a reservation form for a hostel and was never asked to check off boxes for people I did not want to share living space with. And I would have been surprised if they had.
Living space, indeed. A nursing home is not someone’s private property. They cannot dictate who comes in and out of “their” room, not any more than they can they dictate when they take their meds or when they take their meals. Neither do their families have that much control. That’s the unfortunate downside of living in a nursing home, and that’s why people who can try to avoid them. If a person wants conceirge services, they need to think about staying home and hiring a personal nurse. Families who know their elders are raving racists need to consider this as well, if they care about the comfort of their loved ones.
People can living in nursing homes for a long time. My uncle lived in one for more than a decade before he finally died. A hospital may be able to accomodate a “whites only” policy for a patient for a year or so, but then not be able to do that due to shifts in the staff composition. What is it supposed to do then? Make the black nurses put on whiteface? Make the white nurses put on black face? It’s better just to be straight up with that patient from the get-go and say, “Lookahere, Mrs. Racist. This nurse is just as good as the other one. If you have a problem, we may need to find other accomodations for you because we are not able to meet your requests.” Otherwise, they’ll be forced to do a monkey dance for Mrs. Racist for years and years, to the detriment of everyone.
Or maybe the nurse assigned her will be charged with neglect and therefore lose her license and the nursing home be sued if the patient develops skin breakdown and an infection or bedsore from sitting in her feces too long. At the very least, Medicare will no longer pay for pressure ulcers (bedsores) which develop in a long term care facility; feces on the skin is a great way to encourage the development of pressure ulcers.
No. Where has anyone said people *should *be fired?
Firing someone based on race is wrong, and if that’s what happened in this case, of course the nursing home should be brought to task, legally and morally.
It’s exactly to avoid this sort of illegal behavior that I continue to believe that *unofficial *and reasonable (that is, doesn’t put undue stress on the rest of the nursing staff or put patient safety at risk) accommodation (assigning right-color or right-gender staff to avoid stress to the patient) is a better idea than guaranteed accommodation (which may indeed put you into the position of illegally hiring and/or firing based on race). Which was the question in the OP.
bolding mine
Actually, if they’re mentally competent, they have the legal right to do both of these things. Any competent person can refuse or delay any nursing action: meds, meals, bathing, draws for lab tests, etc. I don’t know the legal status of nursing home rooms, whether they’re considered private residences or not.
No, I’m not kidding you. I’m speaking as a nurse (well, nursing student). We accommodate all sorts of craziness in the name of patient care. We try not to cause *any *patient pain if we can avoid it, mental or physical, for whatever reasons they have. A racist patient is still a patient, and I’m bound by my ethics and my license to avoid doing things that might endanger their care, even if I don’t agree with their thought processes.
I work in the mental health field. I’ve worked in group homes and nursing homes for mentally ill people. I have never worked anywhere that accomodated racism (and I’ve worked with racists, including, strangely enough, a Jewish neo-nazi). That’s inappropriate and unprofessional. If you’ve been taught otherwise, you’ve been taught wrong.
Thank you for your input. I’ll be sure to bring it up in Clinicals and see what my teachers think. Perhaps what I’ve observed is nurses doing it wrong.
I join Dio’s request. Please do ask your instructors what they think is the appropriate response to a patient’s request that institution arrange it so that he/she has no dealings with people of color on staff and/or among fellow patients. I think you’ll find their response quite enlightening—and rather different from your own. Do let us know.
A few have mentioned the terrible stress or anxiety that being cared for by a person of the “wrong” race might cause to the elderly and have opined that, out of simple human compassion, they should be spared that stress and their wishes should be accommodated. What I don’t think anyone has mentioned is how many other things can also produce stress or anxiety in an elderly infirm patient. They’re often quite fragile in many ways and quite obstreperous in many ways. My 87-year-old mother recently spent a few weeks in a nursing facility while recovering from a fall. She’s normally outspoken but reasonably polite. During her stay in the nursing facility, she became a holy terror from some of the accounts I heard. I firmly believe that some of her anger was caused by the loss of her own ability to care for herself and that anger was misdirected at the staff who were trying to help her. I think a nursing facility would be utterly irresponsible to try to accommodate any sort of racist request, most particularly if it caused imbalances in workloads or inappropriate preferences in hiring. I’m sorry for the elderly patient who may be traumatized, but the fact is that many of them during the progression from fully competent and autonomous to full-blown incompetence will pass through a phase where they are competent enough to recognize their shortcomings and their need for others, and many will pass through that phase with building anger and hostility. It’s a shame and it’s hard to watch in someone you love, but as far as I know, there is neither a medical nor a legal solution.