ABSTRACT
Contemporary models ostensibly focused on the redress of healthcare disparities, such as cultural competence, rely on notions of “culture” which themselves represent entangled intellectual threads. This article traces the history of nursing's engagement with ideas of racialized social difference in the United States, from the Progressive Era up through the late-20th century, with attention to the ways in which culturalist ideas have been deployed to preclude reckoning with structures of institutional racism and oppression. While nurse theorist Madeleine Leininger often claimed to have introduced the field of nursing to the culture concept in the 1960s, in fact, categories of racialized social difference had been central to nursing since its inception as a profession in the United States. As Leininger and her established subfield of Transcultural Nursing formalized nursing's cultural theory within academia from the 1970s onward, they were challenged by—and pushed back against—Black and other nurses of color who drew on distinctly different frameworks and intellectual lineages of culture to center health equity in their work. Racialized power structures and the individuals who benefited from them amplified work which centered white comfort and suppressed anti-racist work, thereby supporting the status quo of white supremacy in nursing and nursing education.
