On 8 November 2015, former Twitter user @FierceFemtivist published an alarming series of tweets about purportedly racist parents who allowed their child to die rather than be treated by "n***** nurses." The tweets in question, besides appearing on Twitter (cached partially here), were circulated via Facebook and Tumblr and are embedded in full below. According to @FierceFemtivist, she "just had an infant die" that she personally "could've saved" because the child's epithet-slinging, Confederate flag-bedecked father purportedly physically blocked the nurse from entering the baby's room despite the fact that the infant was "crashing fast."
@FierceFemtivist claimed to be the most qualified caregiver in the facility but did not provide a date, facility name, medical condition, nor even a gender for the baby who purportedly died solely because it had racist parents. The child appeared merely as a footnote to the narrative of neatly-packaged racism, replete with a Confederate-flag wearing, stock redneck character.
Even after the baby's preventable death, @FierceFemtivist described its parents as unmoved by grief and simply concerned with whether a black staff member might handle the infant's corpse. No response on the part of the hospital or other medical staffers during the critical event was described in the story; as presented, the narrative reads like the facility passively allowed a baby to die during an unspecified cardiac event for the sole reason that the parents objected to a nurse's race (despite the fact that hospitals and Child Protective Services maintain broad protocols for such emergency interventions). The form of sure life-saving care which could only have been be rendered by that one nurse (and apparently no other on-duty caregivers) wasn't specified in the account.
Readers were left with a number of questions when @FierceFemtivist deleted her account (and along with it, the controversial tweets). Did the incident occur on 8 November 2015, the date the tweets were posted, or earlier? Where was the facility located? Why did no other nurses or doctors intervene and attempt to administer life-saving care, even if they weren't as capable of doing so? Were police summoned to investigate the baby's death? What was the condition and ultimate cause of death? Was the baby male or female? Were any adults (parents or medical staff) considered potentially liable for the purported death?
Fellow Twitter users suggested @FierceFemtivist indicated she was from Louisville, Kentucky, prior to deleting her account. We were unable to locate any news reports of unusual infant deaths on 8 November 2015 in that area, nor were we able to confirm that the purported incident took place in Louisville (or at all):
