“But I Love the Colored”: Unpacking White Emotional Defensiveness and Racial Harm in Nursing Academia

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the discursive, emotional, and institutional dynamics embedded in the racially defensive statement, “But I love the Colored,” voiced by a white nurse leader in academia. The phrase “the Colored,” a US‐specific designation rooted in Jim Crow–era segregation, is deliberately retained to surface how segregationist vocabulary can be effectively reactivated in contemporary academic settings. While seemingly well‐intentioned, such language reveals the enduring mechanisms of whiteness in nursing academia, including benevolent racism, white emotionality, and the rhetorical deflection of accountability. Through historical, theoretical, and linguistic analyses, this paper argues that these racial speech acts function as institutional behaviors that retraumatize racialized faculty and students, cause increased workload and fatigue, silence dissent, and reproduce racial hierarchies under the guise of care. This discursive analysis, which draws on critical whiteness studies, calls for faculty to engage in racial literacy training, self‐inquiry, emotional self‐regulation, and racial accountability. Rather than relying on performative policies, the paper urges antiracist transformation rooted in critical reflective practice, courageous dialogue, and structural change. While the specific linguistic signifiers analyzed here are particular to the United States, the broader phenomena may manifest in distinct forms across other national contexts. Ultimately, this analysis reveals that equity must address white emotional defensiveness within nursing education and the racial harm it produces as the future of the discipline depends not on white comfort, but on institutional transformation.

The statement, “But I love the Colored,” voiced by a white nurse leader in academia, is emblematic of the deep tensions embedded in discussions of race and racism in nursing education in the United States. This paper emerges from this vocalization. Though seemingly expressed with affection, the language carries a weighty legacy, one rooted in segregation, white paternalism, and the enduring myth of white moral innocence (Ahmed 2012; Gusa 2010; Kalunta‐Crumpton 2020; Starr 2022). In the contemporary academic landscape, statements that use “the Blacks” are outdated, offensive, and triggering (American Psychological Association 2020; American Psychological Association 2023; Carter et al. 2024), and when cloaked in “love,” function as rhetorical defenses, subtle but potent ways of excusing, minimizing, or sentimentalizing racism (Matias and Zembylas 2014). While the specific phrasing may shift across time and context, the grammatical and ideological structure remains consistent. Whether rendered as “But I love the Blacks” or its predecessor, “But I love the Colored,” the definite article “the” reduces Black individuals to an undifferentiated racial category, and the declaration of love functions not as genuine affirmation but as a shield against racial accountability (Kalunta‐Crumpton 2020; Starr 2022).

Using the speech act “But I love the Colored” as its discursive point of departure, this paper examines how white emotionality, racial defensiveness, and benevolent racism function through language to sustain institutional whiteness and cause harm to racialized faculty and students in nursing academia. Critical discourse analysis (CDA), a qualitative, interpretive methodology, is used as an analytical approach to examine how language functions as a social and institutional practice (Fairclough 1995, 2010; Van Dijk 1993). The authors identify the institutional harms speech acts produce and call for antiracist transformation grounded in racial literacy, critical and courageous dialogue, self‐regulating white emotionality, and structural accountability.

To underscore that language like “But I love the Colored” or “I love the Blacks” is not an isolated malapropism but has been a part of a recurring discursive repertoire in nursing education, it helps to surface the kinds of statements that perform care while deflecting accountability. These utterances sit at the intersection of white emotionality (defensiveness), affective whiteness (the protection of dominant feelings), and non‐performativity (the appearance of action without change) described by Gusa (2010) and Ahmed (2012). This paper argues that such expressions are not harmless missteps. Rather, they are discursive performances that obscure harm, recentralize whiteness, and uphold institutional inequity.

Statements like “But I love the Blacks” are examples of contemporary manifestations of benevolent racism, which Esposito and Romano (2016) describe as a “seemingly race‐conscious frame that acknowledges and ostensibly condemns a system of white privilege and racial inequity but does so in ways that legitimize and reinforce racist attitudes, policies, and practices” (p. 3). Introducing benevolent racism with a statement can in itself produce a racial defensiveness where readers do not consider their own complicity in white emotionality and harm (Ahmed 2012; Matias 2016) and, instead, evoke denial with statements like, “I would never say that.” Table 1 presents the authors' identified variants of “But I love the Colored,” a taxonomy of linguistic patterns through which white emotionality and racial defensiveness manifest in nursing academia, offered here to implore the reader to reconsider their own complicity and reflect on how such language functions to sustain racial harm.

Table 1.

Common variants of “But I love the Colored”: Patterns of White emotional defensiveness in nursing academia.

Pattern	Representative statements	Key sources
(1) Affection‐as‐Shield	“I love my Black students,” “We're a family here,” “I treat all students like my own”	Christian (2018) and Davis (2017)
(2) Colorblind Deflection	“I don't see color,” “We're all human,” “Race doesn't matter in my classroom”	King et al. (2023)
(3) Intent Over Impact	“I didn't mean it,” “You're making me feel like a bad person,” “You're misreading my heart”	DiAngelo (2018) and Ellis and Kendall (2021)
(4) Innocence/Benevolence Claims	“I've always supported diversity,” “I mentor everyone,” “I'm an ally”	DiAngelo (2018), Ellis and Kendall (2021), and Mirmotahari (2025)
(5) Procedural Cover	“We have a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statement,” “We already did the bias training,” “Our policies are inclusive”	Shahram (2023) and J. L. Smith et al. (2021)
(6) Fatigue/Fragility Moves	“This conversation feels hostile,” “I'm overwhelmed by DEI,” “We can't do everything”	DiAngelo (2018) and Mescouto et al. (2024)
(7) Merit/Good Fit Pivots	“We hire for excellence and fit,” “Standards must be upheld,” “Let's not lower the bar”	McCluney et al. (2021), McLean (2018), Melino et al. (2025), and Sue (2015)
(8) Tone Policing	“What you said did not sound nice,” “It's not what you said, it's how you said it,” “You need to soften your approach,” “Calm down”	Koch (2021), Melino et al. (2025), Oluo (2019), and Pusey‐Reid and Blackman‐Richards (2022)
(9) Academic Hedging	“We need more data first,” “Let's pilot this next year,” “This is outside our scope,” “…not yet”	Bargallie et al. (2023)

These nine variants reveal how white emotionality operates not through overt hostility, but through covert language that performs care, neutrality, procedural compliance, or exhaustion, each functioning to deflect accountability and reinstate the racial status quo.

1. Terminology and Scope

The deliberate use of “But I love the Colored” as the selected phrase of this analysis warrants brief explanation. Of note, this paper analyzes the term “Colored” as situated in the historical, socio‐cultural, and political context of the United States, which differs from other uses and meanings of this term in the wider global community. The term “Colored” is not selected for shock value, nor is it presented as a contemporary commonplace. Rather, it is retained because it carries a US‐specific historical weight that more familiar contemporary phrasings do not. As a state‐sanctioned racial designation rooted in Jim Crow segregation, “Colored” appeared on public signage, in legal documents, and on the doors of segregated hospital wards and nursing schools delineating racial boundaries and legitimizing systemic exclusion (Berrey 2015; Hine 1989; Ritterhouse 2018; Washington 2006). When effectively reactivated in contemporary academic settings, the term carries that segregationist history forward in ways its softer variants cannot fully convey.

The authors recognize that some readers may find the phrase provocative or distancing, reacting with “But I would never make a statement like that.” However, this reaction is precisely what the paper invites readers to interrogate. As the analysis demonstrates, the same grammatical and ideological structure operates across a continuum of contemporary statements (catalogued in Table 1) that are far more common in nursing academia today. The “But I love the Colored” phrase, therefore, functions as both a documented utterance and an analytic anchor, revealing a discursive lineage that the more familiar variants obscure. To ground this analysis, we begin by tracing the historical and linguistic roots of racialized phrases in nursing education.

2. Historical and Linguistic Context

The linguistic and grammatical roots of the racialized statements established above have a long institutional history in nursing education. The term “Colored” was once a state‐sanctioned label, prominently featured in the racial apartheid of Jim Crow America (Berrey 2015; Ritterhouse 2018). In medical Colored settings, Black patients received treatment in segregated wards where they were often relegated to inferior care and substandard institutions. Within educational settings, Black nurses trained in racially separate and unequal schools, thereby internalizing a racial hierarchy that privileged whiteness in both professionalism and care standards (Hine 1989; Woo 2023). Thus, when a white faculty member invokes racialized collective nouns today, even affectionately, they unconsciously reactivate a vocabulary of racial subjugation cloaked in benevolence.

To understand the persistence of this rhetoric, we must examine the foundational whiteness of nursing as a discipline. Through the operationalizing of antebellum Southern linguistic policing, white women have a long history of using the cover of docile niceness in social and professional spaces to tone police people of color (DiAngelo 2021; Jackson and Rao 2022; Koch 2021; Oluo 2019; Tevis and Pifer 2021; Williams 2023). Nursing education in the United States emerged within white, Christian, middle‐class norms for women that actively excluded Black nurses from early training institutions or subjected them to racially separate and unequal schooling (Hine 1989; Tobbell and D'Antonio 2022; Woo 2023). Even after integration, Black nurses were expected to assimilate into white cultural norms regarding speech, dress, and demeanor as prerequisites for acceptance (Dill 1986).

This legacy of exclusionary practices continues today. Textbooks and case studies in nursing curricula overwhelmingly center white, Euro‐American patients, while racialized populations are typically represented through pathology, cultural differences, or health disparities (Newton 2017). Such curricular design reinforces whiteness as the default, both in pedagogy and care. As Canty et al. (2023) argue, this epistemic erasure of racialized knowledge not only marginalizes diverse perspectives but also leaves white faculty ill‐equipped to engage in critical conversations about race, racism, and their own complicity.

Ultimately, the invocation of racialized language is not just a personal error; it is a reenactment of historical exclusion that sustains institutional whiteness. Phrases like “But I love the Colored,” even when uttered with affection, are not benign. They are discursive mechanisms that preserve white innocence while retraumatizing and marginalizing racialized others. This historical context is not peripheral to the analysis that follows; it is foundational to it. The patterns catalogued in Table 1 do not exist in a vacuum; they are the contemporary descendants of this history, operating through the same grammar of racial objectification in the hallways, meetings, and classrooms of nursing academia today. To confront this harm, white faculty must examine how their words carry historical weight, operate within systems of power, and either reproduce or resist racial injustice in nursing education. Before turning to this analysis, Table 2 provides working definitions of key racial discourse terms used throughout this paper. These concepts form the foundation for understanding how language, emotion, and power operate in the institutional context described above.

Table 2.

Glossary of key racial discourse terms.

Term	Definition
Benevolent Racism	Benevolent racism refers to a form of racism expressed through seemingly positive or well‐intentioned behaviors such as expressions of care or affection that nonetheless reinforce racial hierarchies. Rather than disrupting inequality, it reasserts white innocence and paternalism, positioning white individuals as morally good while minimizing structural harm. Sentimentality is often used as a deflection from accountability (Bonilla‐Silva 2019; Hantke et al. 2022; Wake 2022).
Discursive Harm	Damage caused by language that invalidates, excludes, or retraumatizes marginalized individuals. Discursive harm can include microaggressions, rhetorical erasure, and performative allyship that reinforce whiteness while appearing benign (Bargallie et al. 2023; J. L. Smith et al. 2021).
Institutional Whiteness	The systemic privileging of white norms, knowledge, and values within institutions. It shapes what is considered professional, credible, or objective in academic and professional environments (Ahmed 2012; Gusa 2010).
Racial Defensiveness	Rhetorical and emotional strategies used by white individuals to deflect, deny, or minimize discussions of racism, often to avoid discomfort or accountability. These include appeals to good intent, expressions of being hurt or misunderstood, and shifting focus away from systemic issues (Liou and Alvara 2021; Mullarkey Sawa 2024; Zembylas and Matias 2023).
Racial Literacy	The skill and practice of critically examining race and racism, including understanding how they influence social, economic, political, and educational experiences. Racial literacy enables individuals to detect, name, and take action against racism in both personal and systemic contexts (Chávez‐Moreno 2022; O'Brien and Seltzer 2022; Sealey‐Ruiz 2021).
White Emotionality	White emotionality refers to the collective pattern of affective responses, such as guilt, fragility, defensiveness, or resentment, exhibited by white individuals when confronted with discussions of race and racism. These emotions often derail critique, reframe racism as a personal affront, and recentralize white identity, thereby maintaining white dominance and obstructing accountability (Bonilla‐Silva 2019; Matias 2016; Vue et al. 2024; Zembylas and Matias 2023).

Having reviewed the historical and linguistic context established above, we now turn to the methodology used to interrogate the racialized speech act, “But I Love the Colored.”

3. Analytical Approach

This paper employs CDA as its analytical approach. CDA is a qualitative, interpretive methodology that examines how language functions not as a neutral medium of communication but as a social and institutional practice through which relations of power, dominance, and inequality are produced, reproduced, and legitimized (Fairclough 1995; Van Dijk 1993). Within CDA, discourses operate as assumptions, so interwoven into social norms that they become nearly invisible. Yet, they may be made visible through the analysis of texts, with “texts” encompassing any document or utterance that can be examined to question why one thing was said and not another (Slemon 2025). CDA, therefore, aims to illuminate how the intersections of power and discourse create and perpetuate injustices within institutions and society, with an ultimate aim to challenge power and remediate injustice (Slemon 2025).

CDA is particularly suited to this inquiry because the paper's central object of analysis is a documented speech act. The racialized phrase, “But I Love the Colored,” which was voiced by a white nurse leader in academia in the United States, is the speech act being examined. The analytical task is to interrogate what that utterance does: how it performs power, deflects accountability, and reproduces racial harm within institutional contexts. This orientation is consistent with critical whiteness scholarship that employs discursive methods to examine how language sustains racial hierarchies in educational and healthcare settings (Matias 2016; Matias and Boucher 2021).

The analysis proceeded in two interrelated phases. In the first phase, the authors conducted a focused review of the critical whiteness, racial discourse, and nursing education literature to identify recurring patterns of racially defensive language used by white faculty in academic settings. Sources were drawn from critical whiteness studies, critical race theory, discourse analysis, and antiracist education scholarship, with particular attention to empirical and theoretical work documenting how white emotionality, benevolent racism, and institutional whiteness manifest through language in higher education and healthcare contexts. Through iterative reading and collaborative discussion among the authors, nine distinct rhetorical patterns were identified and organized by their discursive function, that is, by what each pattern accomplishes in racial discourse (e.g., deflecting accountability, centering white feelings, and invoking procedural compliance). These patterns are catalogued in Table 1, with representative statements and corresponding citations.

In the second phase, five interrelated conceptual frameworks were applied as analytical lenses to examine the rhetorical, affective, and institutional dimensions of the selected racialized speech act and its variants. The five frameworks are critical whiteness studies, white emotionality, benevolent racism, intent versus impact communication, and racial literacy. Each framework illuminates a distinct dimension of the discursive phenomenon under analysis: (a) Critical whiteness studies situates the institutional context in which the speech act occurs; (b) White emotionality names the affective mechanism through which defensiveness operates; (c) Benevolent racism explains the rhetorical function of the speech act; (d) Intent‐over‐impact communication connects language to measurable harm; and (e) Racial literacy anchors the call for transformation. The frameworks were applied not sequentially but in dialogue with one another, consistent with CDA's commitment to multi‐dimensional analysis of discourse, power, and social practice (Fairclough 1995).

This paper is neither a case study in the traditional methodological sense nor a systematic literature review. The interdisciplinary literature informing this analysis was reviewed purposively for conceptual and analytical relevance rather than through formal inclusion and exclusion criteria, geographic delimiters, or systemic review procedures. It is a CDA grounded in a documented encounter and informed by an extensive body of interdisciplinary scholarship. The speech act serves as the discursive point of departure from which the authors trace how racially defensive language operates across emotional, historical, and institutional registers in nursing academia. The three authors, two Black women and one white woman, are academic nurse educators with more than 30 years of combined experience across five institutions and multiple regions of the United States. The impetus for this paper arose in 2025 during a nursing conference, where a white woman presenter used language the authors identified as derogatory and disrespectful toward the population about whom she was presenting. The ensuing discussion surfaced the many ways white nursing faculty, deliberately or not, bring whiteness into encounters with Black and Brown people. The authors shared examples of racially defensive language they had witnessed in nursing education spaces, and the phrase “But I love the Colored” was revealed by one author as a statement made by a nurse leader in academia in the 21st century.

Within CDA, the authors' positionality is not a limitation but an analytic resource. Because CDA is concerned with how discourse reproduces power and inequality, the researcher's own location within those same fields of power becomes methodologically significant (Van Dijk 1993). The authors' sustained engagement with the discursive patterns examined here, as educators, as facilitators of antiracist professional development, and as members of the racialized and white groups whose interactions this paper interrogates, enabled them to identify rhetorical patterns that might otherwise remain invisible, surface absences and silences in institutional discourse (Slemon 2025), and interrogate how their own categories and framings align with their analytical aims. Having established the analytical approach via design, context, and relationships, the conceptual framework will now be discussed.

4. Conceptual Framework

To meaningfully unpack racially defensive statements like “But I love the Colored” and situate them within nursing academia, we draw on five interrelated conceptual frameworks: critical whiteness studies, white emotionality, benevolent racism, intent versus impact communication, and racial literacy. Together, these frameworks offer a robust analytical lens for understanding how whiteness operates discursively, emotionally, and structurally, not as individual acts of prejudice, but as systems of meaning and power that reproduce themselves through language, affect, and institutional norms. These tools illuminate how linguistic performances, especially during racial tension, preserve institutional whiteness, retraumatize Black and Brown faculty and students, and obstruct the possibility of meaningful antiracist transformation.

4.1. Critical Whiteness Studies

Critical whiteness studies interrogates the invisible mechanisms by which whiteness functions as a dominant social position, epistemology, and institutional norm. Rather than defining racism solely as explicit hatred, critical whiteness studies focus on the reproduction of racial hierarchies through white complicity, normativity, and ignorance (Foste and Irwin 2020; Matias and Boucher 2021). Whiteness, in this framework, is treated not as a fixed identity but as a fluid structure of privilege often unacknowledged, yet deeply influential across institutions including education and health care (Bonini and Matias 2021; Hantke 2022; Romano 2018; Waite and Nardi 2021). This white cultural logic becomes an institutional default as evidenced in application of critical whiteness studies in education (Aronson and Meyers 2020), social work (Hafen 2022), and nonprofit leadership (Heckler 2022). In the context of nursing education, critical whiteness studies invites an examination of how whiteness underpins norms of “professionalism,” “civility,” and “care” (Melino et al. 2025).

Building on this institutional framing, critical whiteness studies provides the foundational lens through which the statement “But I love the Colored,” the patterns catalogued in Table 1, and the institutional dynamics of US nursing academia are read. Critical whiteness studies shifts the analytical question from whether a particular utterance was intentionally racist to how that utterance functions as an enactment of institutional whiteness, regardless of the speaker's stated intent. When a white nurse educator declares “But I love the Colored,” this framework allows the analysis to bypass the question of personal prejudice and instead examine the utterance as a discursive performance that draws on, and reproduces, the racialized norms of the institution in which it occurs. Without critical whiteness studies, the utterance reads as a personal misstep; with it, the utterance becomes legible as a structural artifact of a discipline whose professional conventions were, and in many respects remain, organized around whiteness as a default (Bonini and Matias 2021; Melino et al. 2025; Waite and Nardi 2021).

4.2. White Emotionality

Closely linked to critical whiteness studies is the concept of white emotionality, or the affective reactions, including but not limited to guilt, discomfort, denial, and defensiveness, that white individuals experience when confronted with discussions of race (Matias 2016; Vue et al. 2024). The authors refer to discomfort, denial, and defensiveness collectively as the 3 D's, an original heuristic that names the recurring affective triad through which white emotionality most often manifests in nursing academia. These emotions can obstruct antiracist dialogue and reinforce the status quo. For example, as shown in Table 1, patterns of white emotional defensiveness like colorblind deflection, expressed in statements like “We're all just human,” and “I don't see color,” function as an emotional buffer that preemptively deflects racial accountability (Christian 2018; Davis 2017). Soeterik et al. (2023) found that white student‐teachers navigating a critical race theory course expressed fluctuating emotional responses like these, often retreating into self‐protection rather than self‐reflection. Similarly, Vue et al. (2024) observed that legislative attacks on critical race theory are deeply tied to the emotional politics of whiteness where feelings of threat or discomfort are used to shut down race‐conscious education.

4.3. Benevolent Racism

Benevolent racism refers to seemingly positive actions or statements that, despite good intentions, reinforce racial hierarchies and stereotypes. It draws on the logic of affection (“I love…”) to obscure the effects of paternalism, othering, and white saviorism. As Davis (2017) and Christian (2018) argue, benevolent racism is not a contradiction. Instead, it is how racism persists under the guise of goodwill and “niceness.” By attempting to invoke benevolence to shield critique, niceness functions as a conflict‐avoidant institutional norm that manages discomfort, prioritizes white comfort, and recasts critique as a breach of etiquette. It confuses safety with serenity, asks targets of harm to be “gracious,” and treats empathy as proof of equity.

Niceness operates through repeatable moves to include but not limited to tone‐policing (“be professional”), charitable readings of white intent (“assume good intentions”), procedural deferral (“let's revisit this next term”), euphemism (“not a good fit”), and universalizing claims (“this isn't about race, it affects everyone”). These moves operationalize white emotionality through deflecting harm and codifying affective whiteness to protect feelings, culminating in non‐performativity (Ahmed 2012; Gusa 2010). The affection‐as‐shield and innocence/benevolence claim variants outlined in Table 1, such as “I love my Black students” and “I've always supported diversity,” illustrate precisely how niceness functions as the affective infrastructure through which benevolent racism repackages dominance as empathy (Christian 2018; Davis 2017).

Ultimately, statements like “I love my Black students” or “I love my Black colleagues” reduce Black and Brown individuals to passive recipients of benevolent racism concealed in white sentiment rather than active intellectual contributors. As Gutiérrez et al. (2012) argue, this rhetorical infantilization limits the authority of racialized scholars and reinforces hierarchies of power and knowledge. Fylkesnes et al. (2024) warn that such affective performances are prevalent in “nice” white spaces (e.g., nursing or teacher education), where “politeness” masks structural exclusion.

4.4. Intent Versus Impact Communication

White emotionality and benevolent racism are often deeply intertwined with communication that values good intentions above all else. When white emotionality is triggered, it usually results in the centering of white feelings (specifically the 3 D's: discomfort, denial, or defensiveness), which supersedes any impact of harm experienced by others. The distinction between intent and impact is foundational, as it challenges the belief that harm can be excused if the speaker “meant well.” It also disrupts the commonly held white assumption that unintentional racism negates the impact of racism (DiAngelo 2018). As Ellis and Kendall (2021) explain, what matters is not whether an individual intended to be racist, but whether their actions or words produced exclusion, discomfort, or injury especially in racialized academic spaces.

Well‐meaning, good intentions may be perceived as affectionate, but their impact is to purposefully reinscribe white dominance, covertly reactivate segregationist language, and silence critique. However, by deliberately taking the time to “intentionally” recognize and understand the impact of racism rather than defensively focusing on being unintentionally racist, we center the experiences of those harmed, rather than the emotional comfort of the person who caused said harm (Freborg and Chalmers 2024). The current hegemony in nursing academia, reinforced by white emotionality and good intentions, can be managed through the development of racial literacy.

4.5. Racial Literacy

Racial literacy, used in this analysis, is a critical skill and practice that enables individuals to examine how race and racism shape lived experiences and institutional structures. It includes the capacity to recognize, interpret, and name racial dynamics within social, cultural, economic, political, and educational contexts (Boutte 2021; O'Brien and Seltzer 2022; Sealey‐Ruiz 2021). Importantly, it also entails the ability to respond to racial injustice through informed action. Far from being a matter of individual awareness alone, racial literacy is a framework for developing critical consciousness, interrogating structural racism, and sustaining antiracist praxis across personal and professional settings (Chávez‐Moreno 2022; Grayson 2019; Douglass Horsford 2014). In classes, clinical spaces, and faculty meetings, racial literacy enables educators and practitioners to navigate, name, and challenge everyday racialized interactions and their institutional underpinnings (Harrelson 2021; Hewett et al. 2023; J. L. Smith et al. 2021).

Without racial literacy, white educators are likely to fall into predictable emotional patterns (Matias 2016) that maintain whiteness. Hafen (2022) notes that developing racial literacy demands an inward turn where educators must unlearn inherited logics of dominance, not just teach about racism as an external problem. In nursing academia, where emotional labor is feminized and whiteness in the profession is often conflated with “caring,” racial literacy equips educators to recognize that care, when unexamined, can easily become control (Matias and Zembylas 2014).

Critical whiteness studies, white emotionality, benevolent racism, intent versus impact communication, and racial literacy provide critical lenses for analyzing how white language, emotion, and institutional culture work in concert to sustain racism even when dressed in the language of love. They expose the subtle mechanics of white dominance and offer opportunities to explore pathways for disruption, self‐reflexivity, and transformation. While five frameworks are employed, each serves a distinct and non‐redundant analytical purpose rather than a collection of separate lenses. Grounding our analysis in these constructs allows us not only to understand the rhetorical violence embedded in statements like “But I love the Colored” but also to imagine and enact different ways of speaking, feeling, being, and relating within nursing academia. In what follows, we analyze the racialized and rhetorical function of the phrase “But I love the Colored,” not as an isolated linguistic slip, but as a patterned speech act within white institutional discourse. By interrogating the affective, historical, and power‐laden dimensions of this statement, we illuminate how racial defensiveness operates in faculty responses to racism, particularly within nursing academia.

5. Racial Defensiveness: Analyzing the Statement

The utterance “But I love the Colored” may initially appear to express kindness or affection. However, within the context of racial discourse in academic institutions, particularly in nursing, rather than such statements serving as meaningful allyship, they function as rhetorical acts of white reactive protection of white identity through denial, deflection, or minimization when racial harm is named. These responses rarely arise from a sincere desire to reflect or support others. Instead, they operate as self‐protective rejoinders when white faculty feel implicated in discussions of racism. To unpack this phrase is to reveal the emotional, historical, and institutional scaffolding of whiteness that it both performs and obscures.

In sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, speech acts are assertions that do not merely communicate meaning but perform an action. As Mirmotahari (2025) observes in his literary analysis of Americanah, white progressives often deploy language maneuvers to maintain racial innocence. It is not simply a phrase of affection; it is a mechanism to protect white innocence and shift the conversation away from systemic harm toward white intent (DiAngelo 2018; Ellis and Kendall 2021). In this case, the phrase “But I love the Colored” functions as a defensive speech act, a discursive move that recenters the speaker's moral identity and superficially signals goodwill while simultaneously deflecting accountability.

This white innocence maneuver aligns with color‐evasive ideology (King et al. 2023) or the “I don't see color” perspective, a rhetorical strategy that emphasizes personal intention over the reality of systemic harm. Worn by some as a badge of honor (Leonardo 2007) to symbolize being “racially enlightened,” color‐evasiveness justifies and perpetuates individual inaction and denies and ignores the impact of the institutional normativity of whiteness and racism (Annamma et al. 2017). Intentionally evading discussions about race is, itself, a form of power (Annamma et al. 2017). The conversation shifts from the harm experienced by racialized communities to how white speakers feel attacked or misunderstood. It allows the white faculty to adopt the role of victim.

The colorblind deflection and intent‐over‐impact variants catalogued in Table 1, including “We're all human” and “You're misreading my heart,” illustrate how white faculty shift the focus from systemic harm to personal innocence, recasting critique as emotional misunderstanding (King et al. 2023; DiAngelo 2018). This type of response shifts the emotional labor of racial harm onto faculty and students of color, compelling them to manage white discomfort and racial illiteracy rather than receive acknowledgment of harm (DiAngelo 2018; Ellis and Kendall 2021).

Color‐evasiveness not only perpetuates the maneuvering of white innocence and intent versus impact communication but also manifests within broader academic patterns: “I'm not racist … I'm a good person” emerges when race dialogue threatens white faculty members' professional identity or social standing (Aronson and Meyers 2020; Vue et al. 2024). In this context, the speaker's invocation of “love” in the “But I love the Colored” statement becomes a kind of performative affect, that is, an expression of emotional virtue rather than political clarity. In nursing academia, declarations of love or inclusion often serve as emotional shields, enabling white faculty to evade responsibility while reinscribing racial dominance. As Murray and Brooks‐Immel (2019) argue, such language functions to protect white innocence, displace racial critique, and bypass the lived experiences of racialized students and colleagues.

5.1. The Politics of Feelings: From Affection to Offense

These protective moves are not coincidental. They are predictable expressions of white fragility (DiAngelo 2018) and reflect what scholars identify as the emotional politics of whiteness (Aronson and Meyers 2020; Soeterik et al. 2023; Vue et al. 2024). In this documented encounter, a white faculty member uttering “But I love the Colored” or “But I love the Blacks” may be operating from a place of emotional overwhelm or desire to express moral innocence. Yet, such emotion becomes a deflective mechanism centering white feelings and eclipsing the actual harm experienced by racialized communities. This kind of emotional positioning exemplifies white emotionality, weaponizing feelings as tools to manage and often shut down conversations about race (Matias 2016). In response to these emotions, the speaker in this scenario implicitly demands recognition for their positive intent while evading the impact of their words. In doing so, they turn what could be a moment of reflexivity into a reactive defense.

When white faculty are confronted with conversations about racism or institutional exclusion, their most common responses are emotional, not analytical. These responses often take the form of ego‐driven declarations of care and self‐preservation, for example, “I'm trying my best” or “I didn't mean to offend.” Such language may appear vulnerable, but it is frequently strategic. As Matias (2016) and Vue et al. (2024) argue, these expressions are part of a broader framework of white emotionality, in which emotion becomes a resource for avoiding racial accountability. Likewise, when a faculty member responds to critique with expressions of hurt such as “I feel wounded” or “I feel attacked,” they are not addressing the substance of the critique but instead making their emotional experience the center of the exchange. This shift reframes structural racism as interpersonal misunderstanding; in essence, this is a rhetorical move that reduces institutional critique to a matter of hurt feelings (Murray and Brooks‐Immel 2019).

These rhetorical patterns are deeply embedded in academic culture. White faculty often respond to critique with defenses such as, “I'm not racist, I'm an ally,” an individualistic claim of moral standing and racial competence that shifts focus away from institutional dynamics. Claims of allyship are often made quickly in preemptive attacks to avoid being found out as anything but an ally (DiAngelo 2021). Joseph‐Salisbury et al. (2020) show that faculty of color frequently encounter these defenses and offenses of character in lieu of meaningful institutional response. King et al. (2023) and Iheduru‐Anderson et al. (2020) similarly document how race discussions in higher education and nursing are derailed by efforts to protect white feelings.

This tendency to shield white feelings fosters a culture of avoidance, where white faculty learn to center their own emotional safety rather than interrogate their positionality and privilege. As Vue et al. (2024) and Zambrana et al. (2017) observe, these dynamics create unwelcoming environments for racialized faculty and students. When white faculty respond with “loving” defensiveness, they preempt genuine dialogue and resist the very work that antiracist education requires; emotional appeals then become a substitute for transformation.

5.2. Non‐Performativity: An Illusion of Engagement

Another key function of such statements is Ahmed's (2012) concept of non‐performativity, statements that sound progressive but do not do anything, and, instead, extend directly to emotional declarations. Non‐performativity is often recognized as the institutional act of saying diversity‐friendly things without creating substantive change. “Love” or “caring deeply” are non‐performative utterances that rely on assumptions of white innocence and altruism while gesturing toward racial inclusion and moral virtue without enacting structural change (Ahmed 2012; Matias 2016). Use of these emotional declarations often functions not as genuine expressions of allyship but as institutional strategies of deflection and self‐protection (Murray and Brooks‐Immel 2019; J. L. Smith et al. 2021).

Non‐performativity statements sound inclusive, may perform affective goodwill, and create the illusion of engagement. However, these declarations preserve the white status quo by reasserting the speaker's belief in their moral adequacy while failing to interrogate historical implications, shift power, or repair harm. The rhetorical moves of non‐performativity that feign care align with what Mescouto et al. (2024) identify as affective deflection, where white emotions such as benevolence, hurt, and victimhood are used to reestablish dominance and mute critique. The result is a performative inclusionism where feeling “bad” about racism substitutes for action against it.

Feeling “bad” is often interwoven with procedural cover, fatigue, and fragility, and academic hedging variants of white emotional defensiveness as noted in Table 1, such as “We already did the bias training” and “We need more data first.” These defensive patterns exemplify how non‐performativity operates institutionally, substituting the appearance of action for structural change (Bargallie et al. 2023; Shahram 2023; J. L. Smith et al. 2021). Rather than addressing the critique of non‐performativity, the white faculty member seeks validation for their good intent, thereby invalidating the racial harm experienced by others (Murray and Brooks‐Immel 2019; J. L. Smith et al. 2021). Until white faculty abandon affective self‐protection in favor of structural reflection, statements of “love” will remain as barriers, not bridges, to racial justice in academia.

5.3. Emotional Language Operationalized in the Institution

In fields like nursing that are culturally associated with care and empathy and where the identity of the caregiver is tightly bound to emotional virtue, emotional language often serves as a powerful, if unacknowledged, institutional shield. Thus, in nursing academia, to question a white faculty member's racial language is to challenge not only their words, but their professional identity as a caregiver Freborg and Chalmers 2024; Iheduru‐Anderson et al. 2020). Here, whiteness and care are often conflated, making any critique of a white caregiver's racial language feel like an assault on their very identity. The result is often not reflection, but defensiveness cloaked in empathy (Pittman 2012). As Vue et al. (2024) and Pittman (2012) demonstrate, white emotionality in such spaces is not just an individual reaction; it is an institutionalized emotional grammar that preserves status quo power relations.

This dynamic exemplifies what scholars describe as affective whiteness, the systemic privileging of white emotional life within institutional contexts (Matias and Boucher 2021; Mescouto et al. 2024). Affective whiteness is standardized as legitimate and powerful, while the emotional responses of racialized people are framed as excessive, angry, or unprofessional (Ahmed 2012; Matias and Boucher 2021). In response, white emotional defensive variants in tone policing occur in rhetoric like “Calm down” and “It's not what you said, but how you said it,” as illustrated in Table 1. Discomfort experienced by racialized individuals is often quickly dismissed as a personal or cultural issue; on the other hand, white discomfort becomes a valid reason to halt discussions on race.

Ultimately, white faculty's emotional declarations serve as institutional armor: they protect individuals from the discomfort of critique, mask institutional stasis, and burden racialized colleagues with the task of emotional management. These expressions of pain, love, or fatigue do not move racial justice forward, they delay it. To recognize how emotion operates in racial discourse is not to devalue feeling, but to interrogate whose feelings are institutionally protected and whose are pathologized or erased. In nursing education, where the rhetoric of care is omnipresent, it is especially urgent to distinguish between care that transforms systems and care that protects whiteness. Unless institutions become literate in the emotional politics of race, emotional language will remain an affective barrier to equity and will continue to be cloaked in a velvet glove that shields the iron fist of institutional power. This affective deflection, as illustrated in Figure 1, becomes an endless cycle reproducing and sustaining institutional whiteness.

Figure 1.

Cycle of institutional whiteness. This image reveals the ongoing cycle of institutional whiteness that is sustained by individualized responses of white emotionality, systemic privileging of white emotionality known as affective whiteness, and symbolic non‐performativity. These elements of institutional whiteness influence and are influenced by one another, which maintains this cycle of power (Ahmed 2012; Matias 2016; Matias and Boucher 2021; Mescouto et al. 2024; Vue et al. 2024).

6. Harm to Racialized Students and Faculty

In this structure of affective whiteness and non‐performativity, whiteness is not only protected by policies and practices but also shielded by emotional norms that determine whose feelings matter. Sara Ahmed (2012) explores this in her theory of the “politics of emotion,” where the emotional responses of white faculty become mechanisms for recentering whiteness. She argues that when institutions celebrate “diversity,” they often do so in ways that position white people as open and responsive; however, if racialized people express dissatisfaction in the non‐performativity of equity initiatives, they are usually deemed as ungrateful, divisive, or even hostile. In this affective economy, the institution appears inclusive while it remains fundamentally unchanged.

6.1. The Paradox of Diversity Work Fatigue

This phenomenon of maintaining power through affective whiteness contributes to the paradox of diversity work fatigue. Diversity work fatigue is a form of exhaustion associated with equity work that is experienced by both white (J. L. Smith et al. 2021) and racialized faculty (Ahmed 2012). For white faculty and students, complaints of diversity work fatigue, rooted in desensitization, reduced capacity, and reduced motivation related to equity work, are used as a tool to maintain white dominance (J. L. Smith et al. 2021). As Mescouto et al. (2024) argue, white declarations of fatigue, frustration, or benevolence operate to delegitimize critique and slow change, reinforcing the very structures that cause burnout among marginalized groups. Examples of emotional defensive variants in Table 1 include claims of fatigue and fragility, like “I'm overwhelmed by DEI” and “We can't do everything.” While white faculty may express diversity fatigue as emotional exhaustion from being challenged or having to “walk on eggshells” (for not knowing the “right” thing to say or do), the true fatigue lies with those doing the actual work of equity (Ahmed 2012; Shim 2020).

Regarding diversity work fatigue experienced by faculty and students of color, Ahmed (2012) describes how often individuals are required to manage the emotions of white colleagues, moderate their own responses, and do the intellectual labor of explaining racism while receiving little institutional support. Diversity work fatigue aligns with and is well theorized in the frameworks of racial battle fatigue and the minority tax. Coined by W. A. Smith (2014), racial battle fatigue refers to the cumulative physical, psychological, and emotional strain experienced by people of color in racially hostile or indifferent environments. It is marked by symptoms such as sleep disturbances, chronic anxiety, and burnout (Allen and Stewart 2022; Kohli and Pizarro 2018; W. A. Smith 2014).

Closely related to racial battle fatigue is the concept of minority tax, also referred to as cultural tax. This term captures the added unspoken expectations and responsibilities placed on Black and Brown faculty, including mentoring students of color, performing unpaid diversity labor, and serving as racial representatives on institutional panels or task forces that leads to fatigue (Espino et al. 2023). In critical race theory, this concept is depicted more clearly as racialized institutional tax (Iheduru‐Anderson 2025). This exhausting parasitic dynamic between the institution and the labor received from faculty of color, while essential to institutional functioning, is rarely recognized, rewarded, or protected.

6.2. The Invisible Affective Load and Silencing Dissent

Racialized institutional tax, known for its “emotional labor” or “service overload,” drains time and energy from faculty responsibilities such as research and teaching, which are the very metrics used for professional advancement (Espino et al. 2023). When faculty of color are not successful with tenure and promotion due to service overload, it is not uncommon to witness emotional defensive variants of merit and good fit pivots identified in Table 1; for example, “Standards must be upheld,” and they were not a good fit, we cannot “…lower the bar.” Additionally, when faculty of color are already stretched to the limits, they are often expected to provide racial education for their white colleagues (even though providing racial literacy can impede the progression of their own career and contribute to further marginalization) while also soothing white discomfort, gently correcting microaggressions (at the risk of being deemed “too sensitive” or being tone policed), and remaining composed when their expertise is questioned. Affective whiteness is preserved as institutions benefit from the affective load of faculty of color through racialized emotional strategies (see Table 3 for a summary of racialized emotional strategies in academia). Furthermore, this exploitative labor is further compounded when racialized faculty experience token fatigue, which represents the cumulative toll one endures while required to carry a symbolic presence for the institution (Shim 2020). As described by Pittman (2012) and Zambrana et al. (2017), emotional labor significantly contributes to faculty of color leaving academic institutions, not due to overt discrimination, but because of the exhausting emotional climate and exclusionary practices.

Table 3.

Racialized emotional strategies in academia.

Concept	Description	Impact on racialized groups
Emotional Declarations	White faculty express hurt, affection, or offense to deflect critique (Matias and Zembylas 2014; Mescouto et al. 2024).	Recenters dominant group, invalidates critique
Affective Whiteness	Institutional privileging of white feelings to preserve dominance (Matias and Boucher 2021).	Marginalizes others, slows equity efforts
Complaints About Diversity Work Fatigue	White faculty's feelings of exhaustion and overwhelm toward diversity efforts (J. L. Smith et al. 2021).	Recenters dominant group, slows equity efforts
Diversity Service Overload	Burdening racialized faculty with emotional and service overload to maintain white dominance (Espino et al. 2023; Iheduru‐Anderson 2025).	Diversity work fatigue including burnout, isolation, and attrition
Silencing Dissent	Censoring, minimizing, and silencing the voices of racialized faculty to maintain power, control, and institutional whiteness (Allen and Stewart 2022; Dillard‐Wright et al. 2023; National Commission to Address Racism in Nursing 2021; Sandhu and Liao 2024).	Erasure of personhood, eroding of rights, disenfranchisement, internalized oppression, and emotional distress

Expectations of silence, patience, and constant pedagogical effort impose an unsustainable emotional burden for Black and Brown faculty. Silencing of dissent is a form of linguistic violence that serves as an erasure of personhood and eroding of rights resulting in internalized and externalized oppression, all of which help to maintain the invisible affective load (Allen and Stewart 2022; Dillard‐Wright et al. 2023; National Commission to Address Racism in Nursing 2021; Sandhu and Liao 2024). This silencing effect is not merely emotional, it is institutional. Faculty of color may come to understand that challenging white normativity or naming harm comes at a personal cost: damaged relationships, exclusion from collegial networks, or informal professional retaliation (Zambrana et al. 2017). As Cole and Harper (2017) note, when institutional discourse centers around preserving the dignity of those in power, space for dissent is quietly but forcefully closed off.

Beyond absorbing harm, racialized faculty and students are frequently conscripted into the very machineries of whiteness they experience as harmful. At faculty retreats, holiday gatherings, departmental meetings, and institutional celebrations, their attendance is expected, and their silence is assumed. However, when challenged, emotionally defensive claims that align with procedural cover and academic hedging abound. According to Table 1, phrases like “Our policies are inclusive” and “Let's pilot this next year” maintain white institutional hegemony. In these spaces, racially defensive speech acts are normalized, performed openly, and met with institutional indifference. The presence of racialized individuals is instrumentalized as visible evidence of institutional inclusion, while the distress they carry in navigating these spaces goes unnamed, unacknowledged, and uncompensated. This dynamic of forced complicity demands that racialized faculty and students not only endure harm but participate in the performance of an inclusion that does not protect them, effectively making them witnesses to and unwilling participants in the reproduction of whiteness (Ahmed 2012; Matias 2016). Ignoring this silencing denies the full weight of what institutional whiteness demands of those it marginalizes.

6.3. The Perpetual Cycle of Labor and Retraumatization

For many Black and Brown students and faculty, encounters with racialized speech acts like “But I love the Colored” or “But I love the Blacks” are not isolated. They echo long histories of tokenization, objectification, and epistemic exclusion in academic spaces. The repeated need to explain, justify, and defend one's experience in the face of well‐meaning racism becomes a form of retraumatization (Kohli and Pizarro 2018) and contextualizes the cumulative toll of these harms. This retraumatization is compounded by the emotional burden of code‐switching, managing microaggressions, anticipating resistance, and being silenced (Allen and Stewart 2022). The daily navigation of predominantly white spaces exacts a psychic toll. Gorski (2018) documents how these repeated, cumulative exposures to racial marginalization produce deep emotional exhaustion, a reality that many institutions are unwilling to name, let alone address. The cumulative effects of retraumatization, racial battle fatigue, minority tax, and emotional labor overload contribute to the institutional harms experienced by minoritized faculty when confronted with racially defensive speech acts (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Institutional harms from racially defensive speech acts. This figure illustrates the harms caused by racially defensive statements—such as “But I love the Colored”—within academic settings. These include the accumulation of racial battle fatigue and minority tax, the imposition of emotional labor on minoritized faculty, and the retraumatization of Black and Brown individuals (Espino et al. 2023; Kohli and Pizarro 2018; Shim 2020; W. A. Smith 2014).

7. Accountability and Antiracist Transformation

Taken together, the nine patterns in Table 1 constitute a recurring repertoire of racial defensiveness that nursing faculty, program leaders, and administrators must be equipped to recognize and interrupt, not as isolated incidents, but as a system of language that collectively sustains racial harm within nursing academia. As the analysis thus far has shown, academic institutions routinely extract emotional and professional labor from minoritized individuals while reinforcing patterns that protect institutional whiteness. This maneuvering reflects a broader pattern of symbolic antiracism where institutions adopt the language of equity without transforming the systems that sustain racial harm. Addressing this harm requires deep institutional reckoning, resource reallocation, and a cultural shift that values racial equity over white comfort. To move beyond non‐performativity, antiracist transformation must be understood not as a checklist of reforms, but as a continuous, collective, and often uncomfortable process of structural reflection, cultural change, and epistemic reorientation (Garbers et al. 2023; Hudson et al. 2022; Polston et al. 2023). We will delve into pathways toward accountability and transformation through antiracist actions of racial literacy training, reflective practice, courageous conversations, self‐regulating white emotionality, real policy changes, and addressing reporting and repair structures.

7.1. Racial Literacy Training for White Faculty

Ultimately, statements like “But I love the Colored” silence critique and obstruct transformation. Central to authentic institutional transformation is the cultivation of racial literacy, the capacity to read, recast, and resist racial dynamics as they unfold across historical, social, and institutional contexts. As defined earlier, racial literacy is more than a personal awareness of racism; it is a framework for critically analyzing how systemic inequities are reproduced through language, policy, pedagogy, and professional culture (Chávez‐Moreno 2022; Sealey‐Ruiz 2021). Racial literacy offers a foundational lens for both personal reflection and institutional transformation. When understood as a practice for recognizing, analyzing, and disrupting systemic racism (Grayson 2019; Douglass Horsford 2014), racial literacy enables educators to move beyond symbolic commitments toward meaningful change.

For white faculty in particular, racial literacy development demands more than participation in unconscious bias workshops or isolated DEI trainings. It requires sustained self‐inquiry, critical reflection, and a willingness to decenter one's own comfort in order to interrogate how whiteness operates in everyday academic life (Fallon et al. 2023; Oto et al. 2022); this should be completed not simply at the intrapersonal and interpersonal levels but also structurally (Grayson 2019; Douglass Horsford 2014; Sealey‐Ruiz 2021). Without this critical capacity, white faculty often default to emotional strategies of guilt, affection, or denial to preserve their comfort while stalling institutional transformation (Matias 2016).

Racial literacy equips educators with the tools to recognize and disrupt patterns of racial harm, including discursive practices that maintain white innocence and institutional dominance. Professional learning grounded in Freirean principles of dialogic education, featuring honesty, humility, productive discomfort, and co‐construction of knowledge, creates space for white nurses to move beyond guilt or defensiveness (Sealey‐Ruiz 2021; Skerrett 2011). Effective racial literacy training should be (a) ongoing, not one‐time or event‐based; (b) co‐facilitated by racialized scholars, whose expertise must be centered and compensated; (c) historically grounded, engaging the deep roots of racial inequity in education and healthcare; (d) built around critical pedagogy, including restorative dialogue and accountability practices; and (e) action‐oriented, developing antiracist capacity that translates into policy, pedagogy, and culture (Chávez‐Moreno 2022; Sealey‐Ruiz 2021).

7.2. Courageous Conversations and Reflective Practice

For sustainable transformation, institutions must foster equity readiness environments where critical conversations about race, power, and complicity are the norm, not the exception. These dialogues must move beyond “safe spaces” to brave spaces: environments structured for critical honesty, discomfort, and mutual accountability (Arao and Clemens 2013). Reflective practice models such as Singleton's Courageous Conversations About Race (Singleton 2021); Freirean pedagogy of conscientização or critical consciousness (Freire 2021); and Brookfield's (2017) critical reflection cycle can guide white faculty in examining their assumptions, learning from critique, and rethinking how they teach, mentor, and lead.

7.3. Self‐Regulating White Emotionality

Although building racial literacy skills, engaging in courageous conversations, and employing critical reflection are foundational for antiracist transformation, white faculty must be equipped with the ability to tolerate the discomfort of racial dialogue and build capacity for managing discomfort. They must move beyond emotional fragility rather than getting stuck in a place that perpetuates harm. How do white nurse educators acknowledge and manage and attend to their emotionality such that they can engage in real change?

When white faculty receive feedback for comments like, “But I love the Blacks” or “But I love the Colored,” there is a physical embodiment of the affective response of the 3 D's of discomfort, denial, and defensiveness. Menakem (2017) relates white affective discomfort to the nervous system's trauma responses of fight, flight, and freeze, where individuals are unable to shift to the rational brain to engage in critical conversations. This trauma response, which is tied to the hijacking of the amygdala, hinders the white person from being able to access/process with the logical brain. Consequently, when provided with racial feedback, this nervous system response miscommunicates a perception of harm or threat of harm instead of white discomfort. Rather than projecting the labor of managing feelings of discomfort onto people of color, white faculty have the opportunity to build capacity in emotional self‐regulation.

Menakem (2017) identifies somatic practices as a means for white faculty to be with, manage, and self‐regulate discomfort instead of avoiding it. To tend to a reactive nervous system and be fully present in moments of racial stress, somatic practices aid white persons in emotional regulation. Somatic practices include but are not limited to taking deep breaths, rocking slowly, grounding a part of the body to a surface (e.g., feet to the floor), and supportive touch (e.g., holding one's chest or heart). The self‐regulation of white emotionality requires white faculty to slow down, decenter themselves, increase capacity for tolerating discomfort, learn to self‐regulate, and follow the lead of racialized scholars. Antiracism nurse scholars have found that incorporating emotion‐regulating activities has been an effective strategy for building capacity for white nurses to recognize racial abuses, engage in dialogue about racism without causing additional harm, and take steps towards accountability (Chalmers and Freborg 2022, 2024, 2025; Freborg and Chalmers 2021, 2022). Real accountability includes shifting away from procedural neutrality toward effective policies that address white emotionality.

7.4. Policies Alone Are Not Enough: Addressing Discursive Harm

While institutions often prioritize physical safety and legal compliance, discursive harm, such as the everyday invalidations, micro/macroaggressions, and rhetorical violence racialized individuals experience, remains underacknowledged and unaddressed in policy (Bargallie et al. 2023). Rhetorical gestures of affection that obscure harm must be interrogated for their systemic effects, not merely their stated intent. Statements like “But I love the Blacks” are rarely seen as policy violations comparable to racial incivility, yet their emotional and institutional impact is profound. True antiracist transformation does not begin with a policy manual or end with a training module. It begins with a radical reimagining of what we value, protect, and reward in academic spaces and whether those values center justice or white comfort (Iheduru‐Anderson et al. 2025).

Justice and accountability are not about identifying “bad actors,” they are about interrupting institutional patterns that reward whiteness and normalize harm. Policies that merely prohibit “hate speech” fail to capture how racial harm circulates through well‐intentioned language. White faculty must grow beyond the “race‐as‐hate” model to develop a willingness to critique participation in white dominance via “self‐love racism” (Silva 2019). As defined by Silva (2019), self‐love racism is the “protective attachment to the racialized dimensions of one's social status, wealth, privilege, and/or identity” (p. 85) that exists as a hidden agenda in policies.

To expose this agenda in policies, institutions must go further by explicitly naming discursive harm in community standards, acknowledging how intent does not negate impact, and developing restorative procedures that prioritize repair over punishment. This requires abandoning procedural neutrality in favor of culturally responsive frameworks that center those most affected. These frameworks shift racial literacy, reflective practices in dialogue, and somatic regulation from a theoretical concept into a lived, relational practice capable of supporting long‐term institutional policy change.

The capacity to interrupt the patterns catalogued in Table 1 is not equal across race and faculty roles. Tenured faculty occupy a structurally protected position that affords them greater freedom and power to name and challenge racially defensive speech acts in departmental meetings and institutional spaces. Contingent faculty, including lecturers and instructors who depend on their positions for income, benefits, and professional stability, do not share this protection, and the personal cost of interruption can include non‐renewal and exclusion from collegial networks. This power differential becomes especially acute when the emotionally defensive variants in Table 1 are enacted by those in positional authority, such as deans or department chairs, where hierarchical distance forecloses safe interruption entirely. In these circumstances, the institution bears responsibility for providing protected mechanisms for reporting and redress, so that the burden of challenging racial defensiveness does not fall exclusively on those with the least job security and the most to lose (DiAngelo 2018; Zambrana et al. 2017).

7.5. Support Systems for Reporting and Repair

Included in the institutional responsibility for accountability and transformation is the provision of robust, resourced systems for reporting and repair. Racialized faculty and students need safe, credible, and non‐punitive channels to report harm without fear of retaliation or dismissal. These systems should include confidential reporting mechanisms accessible across ranks and roles; restorative justice pathways that enable listening, repair, and healing; institutional actors (e.g., equity officers or committees) with real authority, not symbolic roles; and funding and credit for racial equity work typically performed “off the clock” by faculty of color (Espino et al. 2023; Shim 2020). Without such systems, individuals are left to manage harm in isolation, perpetuating burnout and reinforcing the minority tax.

In summary, racial literacy training, critical conversations and reflection, self‐regulating white emotionality, policy changes, and providing reporting and repair structures offer effective strategies to address racism in nursing. Figure 3 is an illustration of these trainings and practices that support antiracist institutional accountability and transformation.

Figure 3.

Antiracist strategies for institutional transformation. This figure identifies five antiracist strategies needed for institutions to move beyond non‐performativity rhetoric to action‐oriented transformation. This comprehensive, collective, non‐linear approach includes racial literacy training; critical conversations and reflection; self‐regulating white emotionality; policy change; and reporting and repair structures (Arao and Clemens 2013; Brookfield 2017; Chávez‐Moreno 2022; Chalmers and Freborg 2022, 2024; Espino et al. 2023; Fallon et al. 2023; Freborg and Chalmers 2021, 2022; Garbers et al. 2023; Grayson 2019; Douglass Horsford 2014; Hudson et al. 2022; Iheduru‐Anderson 2025; Menakem 2017; Matias 2016; O'Brien and Seltzer 2022; Oto et al. 2022; Polston et al. 2023; Sealey‐Ruiz 2021; Silva 2019; Singleton 2021; Shim 2020; Skerrett 2011).

8. Conclusion

Racially defensive rhetoric, such as “But I love the Colored,” must not be dismissed as merely outdated language or misunderstood sentiment. Rather, it constitutes a form of institutional behavior, one that reinforces whiteness, deflects accountability, and normalizes exclusion. Although this analysis is grounded in US‐specific linguistic markers, the underlying dynamics the analysis reveals are not limited to the United States and may manifest differently across national and cultural boundaries. These speech acts operate within a broader ecology of emotional deflection, racial unknowing, and epistemic control that actively silence critique, retraumatize racialized communities, and stall antiracist transformation. This pattern is not incidental. As scholars have shown, defensive and benevolent language frequently recurs in institutional responses to racism, especially in higher education (Cole and Harper 2017; Casellas Connors and McCoy 2022). Rather than confronting systemic inequity, these responses often focus narrowly on individual intentions or isolated events, sidestepping the deeper roots of racial harm. In doing so, these racialized responses minimize the lived experiences of racialized faculty and students and reproduce climates in which whiteness remains unexamined and protected (Joseph‐Salisbury et al. 2020; Zambrana et al. 2017).

White nurse educators must take responsibility not only for their intentions, but for the impacts of their language and actions. Rhetorical moves that center white emotions, whether expressed as love, guilt, or unintentional, are not neutral. They function as mechanisms of dominance, imposing emotional labor on those already burdened, and contributing to workplace stress, professional marginalization, and the silencing of dissent (Murray and Brooks‐Immel 2019; Ward 2022). Language and actions shape culture, and when language and actions protect whiteness, so does the institution. True equity work demands discomfort, redistribution of power, and relinquishing the emotional privilege of whiteness. Unless white faculty are willing to confront how their feelings function politically, emotional declarations will continue to act as barriers to the very justice they claim to support.

Accountability must begin with faculty self‐inquiry, a reflective practice that interrogates how whiteness is embedded in one's pedagogy, speech, curriculum, and institutional role. This includes a readiness to audit nursing curricula and policies for racial bias, to engage in sustained racial literacy development, to engage in ongoing critical conversations and reflection, and to confront the dissonance between professional compassion and structural complicity. Most importantly, transformation requires collective racial accountability. This means building faculty cultures in which naming and addressing racial harm is not seen as divisive but integral to professional development and ethical responsibility. It also means recognizing that in order for white faculty to move beyond self‐love racism and engage in racial accountability antiracist strategies, white faculty must be actively engaged in professional development opportunities for learning how to use somatic‐based practices to manage and self‐regulate white emotionality.

Racial accountability requires moving from performative inclusion to transformative justice where the goal is not to feel good, but to do good, even when that demands discomfort, vulnerability, and sustained commitment. Antiracism must not be misconstrued as an individual moral stance; it is a relational, structural, and ethical responsibility. Faculty must create environments that welcome critique, center truth‐telling, and treat racial harm as a violation of professional standards. In a discipline dedicated to care and healing, equity and excellence must not be seen as opposing values. The future of nursing education depends not on our comfort, but on our capacity for courage. The path forward demands a shift from intent to impact, from performance to practice, and from silence to accountability.

Funding

The authors have nothing to report.

Ethics Statement

The authors have nothing to report.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Permission to Reproduce Material From Other Sources

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.