Making and maintaining racialised ignorance in Australian nursing workplaces: The case of black African migrant nurses

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In this article we apply a sociological framework of ignorance to explore the experiences of black African migrant nurses working in the Australian healthcare system. We contend that explorations of how ignorance is constructed, maintained and utilised within workplaces are critical for a nuanced understanding of black African skilled migrants' subjective experiences of institutional racism. This article draws on interview data investigating black African migrant nurses workplace experiences. We examine the intersection between the 'native ignorance' (Proctor, 2008) of the migrant (ignorance as deficit or lack of knowledge) and 'active' or 'systemic' ignorance' (ignorance as intentionally or unintentionally constructed within the workplace) and from this analysis make two significant claims. First, that black African migrant nurses' ignorance about their work/place is created, maintained and reproduced through practices such as: failing to provide important and accurate information about the workplace; the non-recognition, undermining and/or devaluing of black migrant nurses' knowledge, skills and experience; organisational secrecy; and racial stereotyping. Second, that the maintenance of systemic ignorance serves to construct a migrant who is both unknowing and suspect, and therefore incompetent and in need of surveillance. These constructions lead to the underutilisation of black migrant nurses' skills and reproduce institutional racism while also negating the potential economic benefits of migration and undermining the rationales for recruiting black African migrant nurses into Australia's nursing workforce. We live in an age of ignorance, and it is important to understand how this came to be and why... [so as] to explore how ignorance is produced and maintained in diverse settings, through mechanisms such as deliberate or inadvertent neglect, secrecy and suppression, document destruction, unquestioned tradition and myriad forms of inherent (or unavoidable) culturopolitical selectivity.