Melissa Gomes (PMHNP-CERTI ’08), associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion and an associate professor, leads inclusive excellence work at the School of Nursing and oversees its Inclusion, Diversity, and Excellence Achievement (IDEA) initiative. Through a variety of regular teaching, learning, and community-building activities, she ensures that students, faculty, and staff have regular opportunities to respectfully collaborate across difference, tools to find common ground with those they work and care for, and ultimately discover, as she often says, that “we are more alike than we are different.” 

Babes!” He calls to her upstairs. “Want to go for a walk on the beach?”

She rights herself. It was a beautiful day, after all; surely nothing could go wrong today: gorgeous, breezy, not-too-hot. The beach was the reason they had chosen this place, this house. Still, she swears at herself when she hears him add, “Wait, are you going to want to go left, or right?” 

By now, it was a well-worn argument. Sliding his feet into his Birkenstocks, he continues. 
 
“I like right,” he said, mostly teasing. “That’s where my people are. I like my people.” He pauses. “You, I’m not so sure. You funny sometimes.” He pokes her.

They stop on the very spot where a chain link fence divided the beach sixty short-long years ago, segregating the Black beach from the white. From their perch on the seawall, she sees smiling faces and hears laughter before realizing that, yeah, what she’d feared was happening. Again.

-

She rolls her eyes and juts out her chin, striding ahead of him out the door. “That’s not true.” And down at the beach, they turn right. Even there, she can see the crowd in the distance and draws a sharp breath in, slowing her pace just enough for him to grab hold of her hand. “It’s good,” he reassures her. 
 
They stop on the very spot where a chain link fence divided the beach sixty short-long years ago, segregating the Black beach from the white. From their perch on the seawall, she sees smiling faces and hears laughter before realizing that, yeah, what she’d feared was happening. Again. 
 
Two young men are arguing. They’re loud, tense, sweaty, won’t back down. Before long, they are pushing and pawing at each other in the sand, as a crowd gathers and phones record. Fear prickles inside her. Shots ring out. The crowd disperses, and, as they tumble off the seawall, she thinks, “Why did I choose right?” 
 
She chose right because she did not want to confirm the bias ascribed to her. She chose right because she did not want to acknowledge he was right. She was afraid of what could happen… with her own people. The worst kind of treason. 
 
But the unease she feels going right is not shaped by race; it’s experiential. “Going right is dangerous,” she tells herself. “Just last week there was a brawl on senior skip day. Last year, police broke up a rowdy crowd and fights on the beach. Five years ago, a 7-year-old was shot during a birthday party.” 

To the right were people who, as a result of being disregarded, disrespected, and discounted, were reactive, always ready with a fight or flight response. And even though she’d had different opportunities—a tight-knit, loving family, an expansive education, financial security—she’d stoked her own rage as though she’d turned right and belonged there.

-

But, glancing at her own brown skin, she knows it’s not that simple. Going left, she’d faced conflicts of her own, including one with one white neighbor with a penchant for trespassing. Into a heated argument, she couldn’t shake her rage when a passerby in a U.S. Navy sweatshirt who sided with the trespasser said to her, “You cannot make her get off of the beach. I’m higher than you. My family’s been here for generations.”

And when she’d followed the trespasser 20 feet behind for a half mile, telling her to go home, she’d heard the woman yell, “Fire! Help! She’s trying to hurt me!”

Never mind that she’s a nurse, an academic, a researcher, and 4’9” tall. Her rage was thick and overpowering. Would it have been the same if she’d been white and the trespasser Black? What is reality, and how is it shaped by perspective?

She thinks: “I did want to hurt her. I wanted her off my property.” It’s why she’d filed a police report, told her outraged husband, and why they now teeter at the edge of hostility with this same neighbor, who now has a camera trained on their front door. You know, just in case.

This is what happens when a person feels disregarded. Reaction, temper, consequences. 

The shadow of segregation remains, left or right. Conflict is on the same continuum as respect. Successful navigation of conflict lies atop a fault line of distress tolerance and reactivity. While her first response isn’t always fight or flight, she struggles to know where she stands and feels most secure.

-

To the right were people who, as a result of being disregarded, disrespected, and discounted, were reactive, always ready with a fight or flight response. And even though she’d had different opportunities—a tight-knit, loving family, an expansive education, financial security—she’d stoked her own rage as though she’d turned right and belonged there.

The shadow of segregation remains, left or right. Conflict is on the same continuum as respect. Successful navigation of conflict lies atop a fault line of distress tolerance and reactivity. While her first response isn’t always fight or flight, she struggles to know where she stands and feels most secure.

She’ll continue to go right, she thinks, because it makes her feel good, and warms her heart to enjoy a beautiful beach with her community in an area that was once segregated. She will look in people's eyes, acknowledge their worth, and smile, talk, laugh, and connect. She will be an intentional part of the environment, and part of why it flourishes.  

And, she reminds herself, she’ll continue to face the challenges of going left, and of her ability to assert her right to place, space, and perspective when confronted with racism and bias, and the conflict it sows.  

To embrace the complexities and in-between-ness she feels no matter what direction she walks on the beach, but to show up nevertheless. And be better for it. 

Gomes is a practicing psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner, a Distinguished Fellow in the National Academies of Practice, and a two-time Hampton-Penn Scholar. A Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, where she serves on its mental health expert panel, and the American Nurses Association’s mental health and substance abuse national advisory committee, she is part of the Virginia Nurses Association’s nominations and cultural competence and health equity committees. She divides her time between homes outside of Charlottesville and Hampton, Va.