Out of Place
On the first day of summer 2017, a patient called Jan Downes-Springer a "nigger."* Talking about the incident now, almost two years later, she recalls the moment as if it had just occurred. And the words that spill out of her still register the shock of it – that word in her place of work. "I was gobsmacked." She recalls asking herself, "what do I do now?"
Earlier that day she had been doing what she had always done: advocate for BCNU members. As a long-standing employee and now full-time steward at Royal Columbian Hospital, Downes-Springer had seen and heard it all – or so she thought. Just prior to the incident, she'd been in a conversation with a manager about a particularly aggressive patient who had been terrorizing nurses on one of the units. Leaving that meeting and on her way to another, she approached an open elevator. Inside she saw three security guards with a patient. It was at that moment that the man yelled, "Oh you nigger over there, shut the hell up!"
Sometimes, this is how summer begins.
It didn't take Downes-Springer long to realize that the patient who had been verbally abusing the nurses on that unit was the same one who had spat this vicious slur at her. What did take somewhat longer was an adequate response from her employer. Indeed, it might be said that Downes-Springer is still waiting for that response. "They failed in their obligation to me," she says without hesitation when re-telling the series of events that preceded and followed the incident.
Downes-Springer inherited her penchant for advocacy and supporting workers' rights from her father – who brought the family to the United Kingdom from Trinidad in the 1970s. It was a familiar journey for many: swap the sun-drenched islands of the colonial periphery for the rain-soaked islands of the imperial heartland – and then try to make a living. It wasn't easy for people of colour in the England of the 1960s and 70s. But you did what you had to do to survive and make a better life for your children. To that end, Downes-Springer found her way to a training program in nursing and midwifery in Birmingham. She saw the education as her ticket out of England, and following the completion of her studies she cashed in and came to Canada, ending up in Trail, BC – the town that was to be her first taste of life in this country, and described by her first employer as a "beautiful place at the foot of a mountain."
Downes-Springer eventually made her way to Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster which, notwithstanding the considerable charms of Trail, felt more like a place she could call home. It was a good decision. She's been at the hospital for more than 40 years and she continues to be a loyal employee and a relentless advocate.
Downes-Springer's involvement with BCNU was partly shaped by her early experiences as a racialized woman in a 1970s workplace that was marked by
a determined and seemingly deliberate homogeneity. She recalls the racism she experienced for its subtlety – "the looks, the way they would look at you" –and its social exclusion. She remembers the awkwardness of those situations, and the way it felt to be both hypervisible as a black woman in a predominantly white workplace – and then invisible when there might have been an opportunity for a conversation about the weather or the score of the previous night's hockey game.
Both hypervisible and invisible. On this apparent paradox, the writer and theorist Sara Ahmed offers us the following:
"When we talk 'white space' we are talking about the repetition of the passing by of some bodies and not others. Non-white bodies do inhabit white spaces; we know this. Such bodies are made invisible when spaces appear white, at the same time as they become hyper-visible when they do not pass, which means they 'stand out' and 'stand apart'. You learn to fade in the background, but sometimes you can't or you don't. The moment when the body appears 'out of place' are moments of political and personal trouble."[1]
Gulzar Hassan also knows something about the experience of being excluded because of the way you look, and the way you are looked at. But it's something she seldom thought about while coming-of-age in Karachi, Pakistan. Her struggle at the time was relatively minor, and involved overcoming a father's objection to her attending nursing school: "our girls don't go out" – he told her. But go out she did – earning a degree in nursing, before completing a one-year program in midwifery.
It was a combination of regional, local and familial politics that compelled Hassan, her three young children and her husband to leave their home. Canada was their preferred destination and the fulfillment of a dream deferred. Hassan had once turned down an offer to continue her studies at McMaster University because she was pregnant with her first child.
The family arrived in Canada on April 1, 1995. The story of their first few months is a familiar one: a series of low-wage jobs, casual racism in stores and on the streets, petty-exploitation by landlords, and the kindness of strangers. For five years Hassan worked, filled out forms, took refresher courses and looked after her children on her way to proving to the licensing body that she had the requisite skills to provide nursing care in British Columbia. In 2000 she became a registered nurse – for the second time.
Hassan thought she would be readily welcomed into a new family of nursing professionals, but says she soon discovered that the landscape of work was marked by divisions and rivalries that were sometimes about where you were from, how you talked and whether you belonged on that unit.
Hassan recalls with depressing detail the ostracism that seemed to shadow her, the lack of support from her colleagues and the loneliness of the social spaces at break-time. She notes how she "tried to lighten her hair and lighten my skin to look like them." Them. Then the tears come – halting her narrative. Composing herself, she takes consolation in the distance she has put between herself and that time.
There have been many thems over the course of Hassan's nursing career in Canada, but regardless of who they are or where they're from the consequences are often the same: a fragmented workplace marked by exclusion, fault lines, racism. And a body that is scarred by stress and sorrow.
It hadn't occurred to Ugochi Ibediro that the racism and exclusion she was experiencing at work might affect others in her life, until one day, after arriving home from a shift, her daughter said to her, "mummy your eyes are so sad."
Sometimes nursing can do this to you. Make your eyes sad.
Nursing was not the first choice for Ibediro. She really wanted to study electrical engineering, like her father, but growing up in Enugu, in southeastern Nigeria, her career choices as a woman were carefully curated. Anyway, Ibediro's mother wanted her to go into nursing and so she did. She lived in residence - earning a nursing degree and went on afterwards to do a one-year internship in midwifery.
Ibediro came to Canada in 2008, settling in New Westminster, where she began the process of obtaining a licence to practice in British Columbia. At Kwantlen College, she remembers being the only African in class, but looking around the room at all the others who had arrived from elsewhere, she thought to herself, "if you can do it – I can do it." It wasn't easy, though. Ibediro recalls doing the then-mandatory 250 hours in a facility where the other nurses often deliberately ignored her requests for assistance. On one occasion after a particularly unkind encounter with one of the nurses on the floor – she sat in the stairwell and wept. A nurse from another floor saw her crying and said to her, "after crying then what? You should go back to that nurse and tell her your mind." It was a message Ibediro took to heart.
Nevertheless, Ibediro can attest that speaking your mind is often challenging when the words and phrases you need in the moment must be recalled and fashioned into a sentence that reflects how you feel. So, even now, more than a decade into her life in Canada she often remains quiet – still "insecure" in this language, and in a workplace that can often feel less than welcoming and where your co-workers can look at you askance, as if you don't really belong.
Ibediro is proud of her identity as an African woman (she prefers this descriptor to being called Black – noting the gradations of skin-tone in her family and children). She's proud to be a Nigerian woman who has made a career of a profession that was not her first choice.
Ibediro hopes that others can see her for who she is: a colleague, a nurse, a human being whose eyes can shine with both sadness and happiness.
For all three of these women, BCNU's Mosaic of Colour Caucus and the union's human rights and equity initiatives have offered a safe and welcoming place for stories to be told and for racism to be named and challenged as the systemic problem that it is. Everyone has a story waiting to be told - what is required of all of us is a willingness to listen - and then act.
When Downes-Springer reported the incident to the workplace health call centre at the hospital, she described in detail what had taken place and the exact phrase the patient had used. When the person at the call centre read Downes-Springer's statement back to her, she substituted "N-word" for the epithet that had actually been used. Downes-Springer recalls correcting the woman. "That's inaccurate reporting, I said he called me a nigger."
First listen – then act.
For far too many, the time for action is long overdue. •
* Downes-Springer has requested that we print the word the patient used.
UPDATE (Apr 2019)
[1]. Ahmed. S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (p. 135).