Quiet Fire
The Bureaucratic Violence of Neutrality
Hi loves—
You may notice something new today. Sunday has a new name: Quiet Fire.
The more I write, the clearer it becomes what this space wants to be—steady, reflective, powerful in a way that burns slow. This is where I bring the truths that sit under the skin, the ones that don’t shout but still insist on being felt. I’m grateful to have you here as this space grows into its purpose.
I’ve been sitting with this week’s piece for days.
Not just the headline, not just the footage, but the weight of what it stirred in my chest. Some stories don’t come from outrage—they come from a deep knowing, an ache carried in the memory of the body.
This Sunday’s Quiet Fire is one of those stories.
We’re living through a moment where everything feels loud, everything feels urgent, and yet the harm we face is still met with silence. Stillness. Neutrality. And that neutrality has teeth.
What happened in Dallas didn’t shock me as much as it pressed on something old in me—something ancestral, something remembered. I needed to write through it.
Thank you for sitting with me at this fire.
Here is this week’s Quiet Fire.
What follows touches on the realities of obstetric violence, racial bias in medicine, and the terrifying thin line Black mothers must navigate during childbirth. Please take care of yourself as you read.
The Bureaucratic Violence of Neutrality
The video opens mid-scream.
A Black woman is squirming in a wheelchair in the triage area of Dallas Regional Medical Center, her voice raw, her body shaking in the way bodies do only when they are fighting waves of pain they cannot outrun. She’s not being dramatic. She’s not “making noise.” She is in active labor, the kind that makes breathing a negotiation and makes time shrink to a single point in the body.
Across from her, the emergency department nurse sits facing the monitor at the desk—not rushing over, not alerting a team, not even moving toward a triage bay. Instead, she’s asking intake questions. Calm. Detached. As if the screaming woman in front of her is simply an administrative inconvenience whose pain must wait its turn behind standard procedure.
The patient’s mother films. The camera doesn’t shake; the person holding it already understands what they’re witnessing.
The way Black suffering calls an audience. The way indifference has a rhythm to it.
The nurse’s voice is flat, almost bored.
The woman’s cries echo off the walls.
No urgency, no triage, no one rushing toward her—not even when her body lurches and she clutches her belly, calling out for help.
Somewhere behind the desk, keys click. Papers shuffle. The nurse asks her to repeat information she cannot physically speak. A contraction rips through her body and she tries to answer anyway, because she knows how the system works: Black women learn early that if we don’t cooperate—even while screaming—we are blamed for our own endangerment.
The entire room hears her, yet not a single person considers her primal scream as urgent.
Thirty minutes pass like this, according to the witness. Thirty minutes of unassisted pain while the nurse performs the ritual of bureaucracy, as though birth is something that can be paused, rescheduled, or made to wait until the chart is clean.
Later, social media will rage about the lack of compassion.
Hospitals will call it a “violation of policy.”
Some will call the nurse cold.
Some will call the woman dramatic.
But in that moment—the moment captured in pixels and disbelief—what we see is something far older and far more familiar:
a Black woman in crisis, treated as though her suffering is not an emergency.
And the world keeps moving around her as if she isn’t bringing two lives into it.
I Gave Birth to Twins. I Know What Emergency Looks Like.
I didn’t have to rely on medical textbooks or TikTok commentary to understand the danger in that lobby. I have carried twins. I have brought twins into the world. I know exactly what it takes, what it risks, and what it demands.
When I went into labor with my twins, the room shifted instantly. Not gradually. Not eventually. Instantly.
Two teams assembled—one for each baby. Double monitors, double equipment, double hands ready to intervene if even one heartbeat changed tempo. Nurses moved with purpose. Doctors planned two deliveries at once. Every minute mattered, because with multiples, anything can turn critical with no warning.
That level of vigilance wasn’t optional.
It was survival.
And I know this because giving birth—any birth—is the closest many of us will ever come to death. A content creator once said that childbirth is the threshold between the living and the ancestors, and I believe her. I’ve stood on that threshold myself. I hemorrhaged with my third birth. One wrong step, one slower intervention, one indifferent decision, and I would not be here writing this.
So when I watched that woman in Dallas screaming through contractions while paperwork clicked in the background, I didn’t just see disrespect.
I saw the absence of everything that saved me.
I saw the vacuum where urgency should have been.
I saw two babies whose arrival deserved more than a clipboard and a calm face pretending not to hear their mother’s cries.
And I couldn’t help thinking:
If I had been treated that way, my twins might not be here. And I might not be here either.
That isn’t exaggeration.
That’s the math of childbirth.
That’s the math of multiple births.
And for Black mothers, the margin is even thinner.
What happened in that triage area wasn’t just unprofessional—it was dangerous.
Dangerous to the mother.
Dangerous to the babies.
Dangerous in ways that only those of us who’ve labored on the edge of life and loss can feel in our bones.
Because when you’ve carried two hearts inside your body and nearly bled out bringing another into the world, you know—more clearly than anyone—that hesitation is a luxury no one in that room could afford.
Black Women’s Pain as Background Noise
What happened in that triage area didn’t start with one nurse having a bad shift. It didn’t start in that lobby. It didn’t start in Dallas. It began long before any of us were born, in a country where Black women’s pain has always been treated as negotiable.
Black women are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women—even when age, education, income, and prenatal care are controlled. The data holds steady whether the mother is a Fortune 500 executive, a teenager, or a college professor. Wealth doesn’t protect us. Credentials don’t protect us. Compliance doesn’t protect us.
Our pain is consistently under-treated. Our symptoms are consistently minimized. Our emergencies are consistently downgraded to inconveniences.
And none of this is accidental.
American gynecology was built on the bodies of enslaved Black women who were cut, experimented on, and operated upon without anesthesia. J. Marion Sims, often called the “father” of the field, perfected his surgical techniques by using Black women as test subjects—women he did not see as human, women whose suffering he believed did not matter.
But the violence didn’t start with Sims.
Before anesthesia, before “medical innovation,” before clinics and waiting rooms, Black women’s bodies were treated as breeding stock during enslavement. Not women. Not patients. Not mothers. Assets.
They were raped by slaveholders who wanted to increase their “property,” raped by overseers enforcing domination, raped by men who saw their wombs as fields to cultivate for profit. Children born from assault were listed in ledgers alongside livestock. Fertility was exploited. Pain was ignored. Labor—both kinds—was expected.
That legacy didn’t disappear.
It simply changed form.
Now, instead of forced pregnancy, we face forced indifference.
Instead of plantations, we face hospital systems still shaped by the assumption that our pain is either exaggerated or irrelevant.
The “strong Black woman” myth—the one that insists we can withstand anything—has seeped so deeply into clinical practice that it becomes a justification for withholding care. Our screams are interpreted as overreaction. Our symptoms are doubted. Our emergencies become debates.
So when that woman screamed in the lobby, the silence around her wasn’t a fluke. It was a pattern acting itself out in real time.
A pattern in which Black women are expected to be stoic, compliant, and quiet even while dying.
A pattern in which our distress must be proven before it is believed.
A pattern so old we recognize it instantly, even when others swear they don’t see it.
And that’s what makes this moment so gutting:
Not that it happened—
but that it was predictable.
One Nurse Didn’t Create This, but the System Enabled Her
It would be easy to point to the nurse in the video and call her the problem.
To say she was cold.
Uncaring.
Unfit.
And none of that would be incorrect. But it would also be incomplete.
Because individuals make mistakes, but systems create conditions.
And what happened in that triage area was not a one-person failure — it was a structural collapse that made her inaction possible.
Hospitals like to talk about “policy violations” as though that explains everything, as though the only barrier between life and death is a laminated checklist tucked behind the monitor. But policy was never the issue here. Culture was.
Culture is what tells a nurse that a screaming Black woman can wait.
Culture is what allows paperwork to feel more urgent than pain.
Culture is what keeps staff glued to their desks while someone in labor begs for help.
Culture is what turns a medical emergency into an interruption.
This nurse wasn’t a rogue actor.
She was a product of a system that didn’t train her to see Black women as people in danger.
And the truth is:
the hospital already knew there were problems.
Before this video surfaced, another clip circulated of the same nurse mishandling an unconscious patient—holding a wheelchair while their limp body slumped to the side, letting their head snap back unnaturally, offering no verbal or emotional support. That incident didn’t happen in a vacuum either. Someone filmed it. Someone reported it. Someone saw the way she treated a vulnerable patient and still sent her back out into patient care.
The hospital didn’t intervene then.
They waited for the internet to do it for them.
So when Dallas Regional Medical Center announced that the nurse had been fired, it sounded more like public relations cleanup than accountability. Firing is not justice. Firing is not protection. Firing is not reform.
Firing is the bare minimum a hospital does when a situation goes viral and threatens their reputation.
Actual accountability is something else entirely.
Actual accountability looks like:
Investigating why she was still staffed after the previous incident.
Reviewing who supervised her, and who failed to.
Reporting her to the state nursing board, not just payroll and HR.
Examining whether her emotional readiness for high-acuity care was ever assessed.
Asking why the other staff in the room didn’t act either.
Because even if she was the one speaking, she was not the only one in the room.
Other nurses heard that scream.
Other staff saw that woman in pain.
Other professionals sensed the emergency and stayed silent.
If one person doesn’t move, that’s indifference.
If an entire unit doesn’t move, that’s culture.
And culture is what kills Black women in childbirth — not just one nurse with a badge and a blind spot.
This is the part that devastates me:
Had there been no camera, had this family not recorded and posted the moment, that woman’s experience would have dissolved into hospital paperwork and quiet dismissal. A note about “arrival in distress.” A coded phrase about “patient behavior.” A line in the chart that would imply she was the problem, not the person who failed to help her.
Hospitals know how to bury stories.
But this one didn’t stay buried, because a mother refused to keep her phone down.
There is no world where a Black woman in active labor should ever be met with stillness.
And yet, in that room, stillness was the first response she received.
Because in that hospital, for that staff, and in that moment, her crisis didn’t register as urgent.
Not to a nurse.
Not to her colleagues.
Not to the system designed to protect her.
And that is the part we cannot unsee.
The Cultural Weight of Twins — What Was Lost in That Moment
There is something else about this story that almost no one is talking about, and I can’t ignore it because it lives in my bloodline:
that woman was carrying twins.
People treat twins like a medical anomaly—an interesting footnote, a quirky plot twist, a biological surprise. But in many Black families, twins are not unusual at all. They are a pattern. A lineage. A sign.
My family has them in nearly every generation. My aunt had triplets. My mother carried twins. I didn’t know I had been a twin until I told my mother I was pregnant with twins myself, and she responded the way our elders often do—casually, as if dropping a secret only when it becomes relevant.
“Oh,” she said, “you were a twin too.”
In the African diaspora, twins are not just births.
They are blessings.
In Yoruba cosmology, the Ìbejì—the sacred twins—are seen as powerful, protected children. Their arrival signals abundance, not accident. They are believed to carry both spiritual and ancestral significance. Even in the Caribbean and the American South, echoes of this belief remain: special names, special rites, special care.
You don’t treat twins like an afterthought.
You prepare.
You respect.
You show up.
Which is why watching that woman scream in a wheelchair struck me in a way that went beyond medical fear.
It hit something older, deeper, ancestral.
Because twin pregnancies are already fragile.
Already high-risk.
Already demanding of vigilance and reverence.
You don’t ignore a twin birth.
You don’t delay a twin birth.
You don’t tell a woman carrying two lives to hold her pain while you finish a form.
What happened in that triage area wasn’t just clinical negligence—it was cultural violence.
A failure to recognize that this woman’s pregnancy carried history.
A failure to understand that her womb held more than biological possibility.
A failure to see what twins mean to us.
Two babies.
Two souls.
Two blessings.
Two futures.
Entering a world that refused to acknowledge their arrival as worthy of urgency.
In my family, twins were met with preparation and awe, even when resources were scarce. But in that hospital, they were met with stillness. With bureaucracy. With the kind of indifference that tells you no one in the room saw what she was carrying—not medically, not spiritually, not at all.
And that is its own kind of heartbreak.
Because when a Black woman brings twins into the world, she is not just giving birth.
She is continuing something ancient.
She is keeping a lineage alive.
And in that lobby, no one treated her like she was holding anything sacred.
The Modern Nurse Ratched — Weaponizing Procedure Over Humanity
There’s a familiar archetype that emerges whenever power meets vulnerability, especially in medical spaces: the gatekeeper who uses calm detachment as a form of control.
The one who hides behind policy.
The one who mistakes stoicism for professionalism.
The one who treats suffering like an inconvenience.
In American culture, she has a name: Nurse Ratched.
The original Nurse Ratched didn’t scream, didn’t hit, didn’t lose her temper.
Her violence was quiet.
Methodical.
Administrative.
She followed rules to the letter while stripping her patients of dignity, autonomy, and safety.
And that is the posture I saw in the Dallas triage video.
Not a villain in the cartoonish sense—no raised voice, no open cruelty—but something more insidious:
a bureaucratic calm so rigid it becomes a form of harm.
A woman in active labor screams, and the nurse answers with intake questions.
A mother cries out for help, and the nurse looks at her monitor.
A medical crisis unfolds in real time, and the nurse defaults to script.
This is what bureaucratic violence looks like:
harm delivered through procedure, sanctioned by professionalism, protected by neutrality.
Because nothing in the nurse’s tone changed.
Nothing in her posture shifted.
Nothing in her demeanor signaled that she recognized the danger right in front of her.
That’s the part that stays with me long after the video ends:
She didn’t have to raise her voice to communicate contempt.
She didn’t have to insult anyone to communicate dismissal.
She didn’t have to deny care outright to deny care effectively.
Her calm was not compassion.
It was control.
The kind of control that tells a patient:
You will wait.
You will comply.
You will endure this pain quietly until I am ready to act.
Your emergency does not dictate my urgency.
Your suffering is not persuasive.
And in America, Black women recognize that tone instantly.
We have heard it in hospitals, in social services, at schools, at airports, in workplaces, in courtrooms.
The polite dismissal.
The quiet condescension.
The steady voice that says without saying,
“I don’t believe you. I don’t accept this as urgent. You will wait because I said so.”
It is the same tone Harriet Jacobs described from enslavers, the same indifference described by generations of Black mothers who gave birth without anesthesia, without consent, without advocacy.
The calm face that gaslights you into thinking your pain is an inconvenience.
This is why the “modern Nurse Ratched” metaphor is not sensational — it’s accurate.
It names a pattern of harm delivered through composure.
It names the power dynamic behind the desk.
It names the refusal to act dressed up as professionalism.
Because in that moment, the nurse in the video wasn’t just unresponsive.
She was enforcing order over care.
Procedure over humanity.
Silence over safety.
And that’s what made her dangerous.
Not her voice.
Not her words.
Not even her anxiety.
But her belief — conscious or not — that the system’s rhythm mattered more than this Black woman’s screams.
A Return to the Moment We Can No Longer Unsee
When I return to the video now, it feels different than it did the first time.
Not because the woman’s scream has changed — but because I have changed in how I hear it.
I hear the history behind it.
I hear the silence that met it.
I hear the systems that taught those workers not to move.
I hear the echo of every Black woman who has cried out during childbirth and been told, in one way or another, to wait.
And I hear the danger in it — not metaphorical, not symbolic, but literal.
A woman carrying twins, sitting in a wheelchair, begging for help while the world around her pretended it was just another Tuesday.
This wasn’t a misunderstanding.
This wasn’t a bad day.
This wasn’t one nurse’s mistake.
It was obstetric violence caught on camera.
A snapshot of a system that routinely decides our pain is exaggeration, our urgency is optional, and our survival depends on how well we can endure neglect.
If her mother hadn’t recorded it, that moment would have disappeared into a chart note.
Filed away.
Neutralized.
Erased.
But we saw it.
We saw her body lurch with contraction.
We saw her suck in air between screams.
We saw her cling to the edges of the wheelchair as if bracing herself against the entire history of this country’s indifference to Black women in labor.
And we saw a nurse who did not stand.
A staff who did not move.
A system that did not recognize her suffering as urgent.
Not her voice.
Not her pain.
Not the two lives inside her.
This is what people mean when they say the system is not broken —
it is functioning exactly as it was built.
And still, she brought those babies into the world.
Still, she labored.
Still, she endured what she should never have had to survive.
Because that’s what Black women have always done, even when the world around us refuses to move.
But this time, the world saw her.
This time, her pain was not dismissed into silence.
This time, the camera held the truth steady.
And now we know.
We know what neglect looks like.
We know what indifference sounds like.
We know how easily a crisis can be ignored when the person in danger is a Black woman.
And that is the part we will not unsee.
Not today.
Not ever.
Written in response to the Dallas Regional Medical Center incident involving a person in active labor, as documented on social media in November, 2025.
Thank you for sitting with me in this heat, for honoring the truth carried in our bodies and the stories handed down through our lineage.
May you move through the rest of your day with gentleness and protection.
Until next time,
Jewels💎