What Two Court Cases Reveal About Race and Power in Nursing Today
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Thirty days into my nursing career, I became a target. The bullying was so relentless that it changed my entire professional path and, frankly, my nervous system. I’d entered the field with a singular goal of working in critical care, but within three years, I had abandoned that dream and was managing PTSD symptoms that followed me long after I left the unit.
So when I read DonQuenick Joppy’s story, the recognition was instant. Though I’m a white woman, the dynamics were achingly familiar—patterns I’ve seen play out in my own life and in the lives of countless colleagues, mentors, and friends. The truth is this: I know far more nurses who have experienced bullying, harassment, or racism than those who haven’t.
The DonQuenick Joppy and RaDonda Vaught cases, placed side by side, function as an unflattering report card for the career—a snapshot of our chronic refusal to confront the inequities baked into nursing culture.
But they also offer something else: a chance to choose differently. We can build a profession that protects all nurses and honors our ethics in practice rather than in rhetoric alone.
The Foundations of Nursing Culture
Professional cultures—like nursing—are shaped by shared beliefs, values, symbols, and myths. The stories we elevate, and the heroes and villains we choose, become the fabric of our collective identity.
In the U.S., nursing rooted its identity in Florence Nightingale and named her as our patron saint. The story we’re told casts her as a courageous woman who braved a war zone, outworked her sexist detractors, cleaned up a field hospital, and laid the foundation for modern nursing.
It’s an attractive narrative for American nurses to adopt, to be sure. With its focus on individualism, work ethic, and a lean-in brand of feminism, it’s no wonder our profession—overwhelmingly composed of white women—connected with it so powerfully.
But is it true? And why does it matter?
Nightingale did lead a small team of nurses to the Crimean Peninsula and imposed sanitation standards that saved lives. Yet this tidy narrative leaves out the threads that still hang loose in nursing culture today, chiefly, race and class.
We rarely acknowledge that Nightingale’s mission was only possible because she was personally invited by the British Secretary of War and came from elite wealth. Or that Mary Seacole, a Black woman, made the same journey independently, set up care near the front lines with no government support, and also saved lives—only to be erased from the story for more than a century.
Most egregious is what the prevailing narrative omits: Nightingale was deeply racist and classist. Before departing Britain, Seacole tried to join her, but Nightingale refused to see her, later spreading rumors to discredit her and discourage soldiers from seeking her care.
Throughout her career, Nightingale fought to restrict the profession to wealthy white women, excluding poor, working-class, BIPOC, and male nurses. Those hierarchies still shape our workforce demographics today and contribute to inequities like the disproportionately poor outcomes for Black mothers and infants.
Sharon Goldfarb, DNP, is a faculty member of nursing and public health at the University of San Francisco and CEO of ACHIEVE Innovations. She has spent her career advancing health equity and notes that these dynamics remain deeply entrenched: “Fifty percent of nursing students have experienced lateral violence. It’s baked into the culture. Then add racism, structural racism, and implicit bias—and we see how that pans out,” she says.
In my experience, nurses become defensive when confronted with this history. Some dismiss Nightingale as “a product of her time,” a claim that ignores the abolitionists and anti-racists who were her contemporaries and peers. Others admit her flaws but insist the good outweighs the bad. But brushing off these truths only preserves the blind spots that continue to harm the profession and the patients we serve.
Nursing Culture Today
In the U.S., nursing is overwhelmingly led and shaped by white women. Black women remain underrepresented at every level—from students to faculty to executives. Our culture can be defined as one of white womanhood: not a skin color, but a set of messages the profession absorbs and reproduces.
Joanna Seltzer Uribe, EdD, MSN, RN, is a researcher, informaticist, and co-creator of “Nurses You Should Know,” and has studied this phenomenon extensively. In her dissertation, “White Nurses, White Spaces, and the Role of White Racial Identity in the American Nursing Profession,” she details how white womanhood is embedded in nursing and how it harms us.
“Whiteness is an action of closure,” she says, “where separation of power and resources is deemed necessary to protect white spaces. It assumes scarcity and preserves resources for white people.” White womanhood in nursing, she adds, is about maintaining spaces where white women maintain proximity to power and prestige; historically, this is to prove their worth to white male physicians.
White womanhood creates a culture obsessed with niceness, respectability, and avoiding conflict at all costs. It demonizes anger, infantilizes white women as fragile, and dehumanizes Black women. These dynamics are visible everywhere in our society, especially in the criminal justice system, where white defendants are humanized while Black defendants (even children) are adultified and dehumanized.
White supremacist culture harms everyone, but its hierarchy places white women near the top—privileged and protected—while Black women bear disproportionate harm.
Racism in Nursing
Throughout my seven years as a registered nurse, I’ve watched nursing leadership gesture toward racial equity only when it was politically convenient.
But the cases of RaDonda Vaught and DonQuenick Joppy are the clearest evidence of structural racism in our profession I’ve seen, and the new narrative forming around them is one I refuse to leave unaddressed.
Vaught, a white ICU nurse, killed a patient after committing ten egregious errors. Joppy, a highly regarded Black ICU nurse, was relentlessly bullied, repeatedly reported the abuse, and was ultimately singled out to be unlawfully fired after a sham investigation into a chaotic clinical event.
White nurses in positions of authority then coordinated a false account and submitted it to the Colorado DPHE, resulting in criminal charges against her—a rarity for anyone, let alone someone who followed policy.
Both women were criminally charged. Vaught was found guilty of two felonies and had her license revoked. The charges against Joppy, born of a false narrative, were dismissed “in the interest of justice.”
The aftermath told the real story: nursing organizations, influencers, and media outlets twisted facts to cast Vaught as a martyr while erasing Joppy entirely.
And that erasure matters. The American Nurses Association (ANA) insists that advancing social justice and health equity is a moral imperative, yet selective accountability is injustice manifest. Fairness and professionalism are cultural constructs, not objective, and the culture of nursing has long been rooted in racism and classism. Harm against Black nurses, then, is not an aberration; it is predictable.
Still, white womanhood often deflects responsibility by reducing systemic issues to interpersonal ones. For many white nurses, racism is something that happened long ago, elsewhere, perpetrated by someone else. But as Maya Angelou wrote, “White men may have worn the hoods, but white women sewed them.” So when white nurses say, “That’s awful, but it would never happen in my unit,” they reveal exactly why it does.
Structural racism is not theoretical or historical; it is shaping policy and destroying careers in real time. We need to look under the hood of nursing culture and confront the power dynamics that determine who is protected and who is sacrificed. The Nightingale myth laid the groundwork for the crisis we now face and the cycles of harm we continue to reproduce—cycles that devastate BIPOC nurses.
Nurses like DonQuenick Joppy.
Because the stories we tell ourselves matter. They shape culture, dictate policy, and determine whether we cause harm or choose healing. We must get this story right before we repeat it yet again.
The Cases in Question
Across podcasts, interviews, and think pieces, I’ve seen many errors and misinformation spread about both cases and that is part of the problem. Oppression survives not just in overt acts of violence, but in the stories powerful institutions tell afterward.
Structural racism and power dynamics that enforce it have evolved to become camouflaged, providing plausible deniability for perpetrators while making it nearly impossible for victims to get support. Racism in nursing can be overt, but it is often subtle: denied leadership opportunities, unsafe patient assignments, lack of help when needed, or icy receptions at hand-off despite flawless performance.
It also shows up in how power is wielded—as a shield or a hammer. It decides who receives resources, grace, and the benefit of the doubt, and who is dismissed or disparaged.
As you examine these cases, ask yourself: who has their edges softened and who is harshly interrogated? When facts are bent, for whom do they arc? Who is championed and who is ignored?
State of Tennessee v. RaDonda L. Vaught
As a former ICU nurse, I find it difficult to convey just how shocking the RaDonda Vaught case was to the nursing community. In December 2017, Vaught was a white ICU nurse working as additional staff available to help colleagues. She covered another nurse’s patient who was waiting in the radiology department for diagnostic imaging and administered what she believed was an anti-anxiety medication—but it was actually a paralytic. The patient, 75-year-old Charlene Murphey, later died.
The patient’s nurse initially caught the error. Vaught was fired, but told the hospital would take no further action. The case only reached state and federal authorities thanks to a whistleblower, leading to criminal charges. In 2022, Vaught was convicted of criminally negligent homicide and abuse of an impaired adult. She was sentenced to three years’ probation.
Throughout this ordeal, Vaught received overwhelming support from the nursing community, including statements of support from the American Nurses Association (ANA), the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), and the Tennessee Nurses Association, as well as coverage by countless influencers—nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and lawyers alike.
Many ICU nurses, myself included, were somewhat confused by this support at the time. While criminalizing medical errors is problematic, calling Vaught’s actions a mere “mistake” never felt right.
Subsequent reporting revealed she took ten actions that led to the patient’s untimely death, including:
- Improperly looking up a medication
- Ignoring multiple system warnings
- Violating the five rights of medication administration
- Failing to verify with a second nurse
- Insufficiently monitoring the patient
- Failing to document her errors
Soucy et al. summarized the hypocrisy aptly in Health Equity: “Framing the event as a mistake and highlighting honest reporting is a misrepresentation and obscures the truth: Competent nursing practice would have prevented Mrs. Murphey’s death.”
DonQuenick Joppy v. HCA-HealthOne
DonQuenick Joppy, a Black ICU nurse, was a three-time Daisy Award nominee and recipient of an American Heart Association Award of Excellence for teaching CPR in her community.
Yet for a year at The Medical Center of Aurora (an HCA hospital), she reported that she was bullied by fellow nurses—despite reporting the treatment to her managers and HR. In that time, she states she was denied training opportunities, humiliated publicly, given unsafe assignments, and treated coldly.
During a night shift in May of 2019, Joppy was told she’d be receiving an admission from the ER: an elderly patient in septic shock, organs failing, spiraling fast. No one bothered to tell her the patient was DNR. No one acknowledged that his healthcare proxy was physically present. Instead, ER staff ignored his proxy, intubated him, placed him on a ventilator, and proceeded as if his stated wishes—and his legal decision-maker—were irrelevant.
Once Joppy settled the patient and the proxy was finally allowed into the ICU, the reality of what had been done was unmistakable: a man who explicitly refused aggressive interventions was now tethered to machines he never wanted. So Joppy contacted the care team, relayed the proxy’s request to withdraw care, and advocated for the patient’s right to die as he intended, even as she continued to carry out the existing orders for aggressive life-sustaining treatment.
Then came shift change. The incoming nurse was overwhelmed. Joppy stayed because abandoning a rapidly evolving end-of-life situation is not what ethical practice looks like. She called respiratory therapy for a terminal extubation, the standard, system-approved pathway. But in a dangerously understaffed unit, no one came. Her charge nurse refused to help. So she called respiratory therapy again. This time, they instructed her to turn off the ventilator. She did. The patient died peacefully, his niece at his side.
A Critical Care Nurse’s Perspective
If you’re a critical care nurse like me and are struggling to locate the controversy here, you’re not alone. What, precisely, could the hospital have “misinterpreted” so catastrophically that it translated a normal, if chaotic, clinical situation experienced often in ICUs into charges of manslaughter, negligent death of an at-risk person, and neglect?
The answer, of course, didn’t come from the event; it came from the people determined to weaponize it. In the days that followed, the same nurses who had spent a year harassing Joppy began questioning her care, insinuating wrongdoing where there was none.
Their accusations were cloaked in a sham hospital investigation. Joppy was the only person associated with the case to be investigated or disciplined. In a final act of malicious institutional retaliation masquerading as concern for patient safety, the hospital’s director of quality improvement and patient safety submitted the phony narrative to DPHE, which then informed the Colorado Attorney General, setting criminal charges in motion.
At the same time, they sent the report to the Colorado Board of Nursing, which subsequently informed Joppy that there was no need for them to take any action on her license.
The charges were eventually dismissed “in the interest of justice,” but the damage was done. Joppy filed a lawsuit against The Medical Center of Aurora in April 2022, and in August 2025, a jury awarded her $5 million plus $15 million in punitive damages for racial discrimination and retaliation.
The type of bullying behavior Joppy reported is prevalent in nursing. However, it is rarely addressed, and something that Amie Archibald-Varley, RN, MN, a bestselling author, speaker, and consultant, knows all too well: “Nursing is a club and bullying happens in plain sight…there are endless ways to punish nurses they don’t like. And who gets harmed? Often it’s not just the nurse, but the patients too,” she says.
Comparing the Fallout: Rousing Support & Deafening Silence
To say there was a seismic difference in how the nursing community handled these two cases would be underselling it. RaDonda Vaught received rousing, ongoing support from our professional organizations and influencers, is available for hire through a speaker’s bureau, has appeared at numerous nursing and healthcare conferences, and is scheduled to speak at additional events in 2026.
DonQuenick Joppy received virtually no media coverage, statements of support, or podcast features even after reaching out directly to many of these same organizations and influencers, including the ANA and AACN. To date, neither has made public comments about Joppy’s case. What little coverage she did receive included misinformation that falsely conflated these two cases and had to be corrected.
Over $200,000 was raised for Vaught, and only $10,000 was raised for Joppy. The hashtag #IStandWithRadonda was shared thousands of times, and only a handful of almost exclusively BIPOC nurse influencers have covered Joppy’s story. The Executive Speakers Bureau now represents Vaught and charges $5,000 to $10,000 per speaking engagement, billing her as “A passionate advocate for safety and improvement.”
Cambria Nwosu, DNP, RN, LNC, is a health care executive, legal nurse consultant, and nurse influencer whose platform is dedicated to furthering civil rights, health equity, and advocacy. “I try to focus especially on stories that aren’t getting covered in mainstream media. People are craving truth and transparency, now more than ever.”
When discussing these cases, she says the outcomes were extreme in both directions but follow a well-worn pattern that black nurses are familiar with: “These two situations are the perfect case study for structural racism. Vanderbilt protected Vaught, and she was only punished because a whistleblower came forward. Joppy was targeted. And as a black nurse, I know that experience all too well, because black nurses in specialty units are viewed as an automatic threat and are under constant scrutiny.”
Nwosu was also angered but unsurprised by the lack of support Joppy received and the seemingly deliberate distortion of the facts in the aftermath, “Distortion of the truth creates space for selective advocacy. When we let the narrative drift from accuracy, we also drift away from equity.”
Meg Lambrych, RN
WriterMeg Lambrych is a registered nurse, writer, and nursing advocate from Upstate New York.
After leaving clinical care due to burnout, she dedicated her life to covering issues in healthcare, nursing, and health in the digital space. She reports on nursing culture, policy, and history and interviews nursing innovators and leaders shaping the profession and challenging the status quo.