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Why I faked being black for med school
- gkop 11y agoAffirmative action is bad because jerks like the author will do totally unethical things to abuse it, and the same jerks will be resentful of other minorities that affirmative action helps? If this is the best he can come up with arguing against affirmative action, well maybe affirmative action is actually ok.
- justizin 11y agoYeah, the only way an individual who isn't black is harmed by affirmative action is if they were only going to get some opportunity by a hair anyway. This tugs at the complex notion of, "well represented minorities". The reason the author didn't get an edge for being of Indian descent is because Ivy League schools and top-paying careers have a representation of Indian and Asian Americans that is much nearer (without claiming to have memorized numbers) their portion of the overall populace than African Americans and Latinos, and Affirmative Action is about breaking the glass ceiling.
- gkop 11y agoFor the record, I think it's a complicated subject, and we can always do better than the status quo. But this article is not helping the cause of those that want to end affirmative action; it identifies their cause with jerks.
- pessimizer 11y ago> Yeah, the only way an individual who isn't black is harmed by affirmative action is if they were only going to get some opportunity by a hair anyway. That's the source of my fascination with university anti-affirmative action activists: their cases in court rest on the claim that they were less qualified than every single person of an identical racial designation that was actually accepted to the school.
- tsotha 11y agoI don't see how that's relevant.
- alextgordon 11y agoIf you actually read the article, it says he stated his social background precisely on the application. They chose to ignore it and focused on the amount of melanin in his skin.
- gkop 11y agoIsn't that the definition of affirmative action?
- alextgordon 11y agoIt's the definition of racism for sure!
- DanBlake 11y agoI would argue the problem with AA is not that people might abuse it, but because its a fundamentally flawed system that starts to prefer certain races to one another. For instance, asians are definitely a minority in the US but are extremely heavily discriminated against when applying to colleges. There is even a lawsuit against harvard right now that shows how harvard denied many asian students in favor of other minority's. So, thats one issue with AA. The other is simply that fields like medicine should have only the best of the best getting through. Why should a native american kid who did shitty all through high school get to go to med school and a asian kid who got a perfect 4.0 and did extra curricular things not. This is making america worse and in many cases further pushes a racial divide agenda that says "minority's cant hack it in the real world". What is worrying is that the truly great minority leaders/thinking/doers/etc.. will have their accomplishments completely invalidated by their non-minority peers for thinking they got to where they are just because of their racial makeup. Just to see the above in action, look at this reddit thread : https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/2zun6p/accepted_into_medical_school/ https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/2zun6p/accepted_int...
- gkop 11y agoI agree with you that liability for abuse is not a significant problem with AA. I am not convinced one way or the other on the overall cost/benefit, but lean in favor of AA because it helps with my white guilt.
- pcthrowaway450 11y agoDon't worry Dan, the word 'minority' has been redefined to not include Asians. I was informed of this the other week by an Asian friend who's a college student. She mentioned it in passing like it was just basic knowledge.
- theorique 11y agoPeople use the term "NAM", or non-Asian minority, to separate out minorities who are affirmative-action target populations from non-Whites as a whole.
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- pcthrowaway450 11y agoSeems that there's a pipeline of affirmative action programs throughout the medical profession starting with admission to college and ending at the hospital where there are quotas for hiring black and latino doctors. That's an absolutely terrifying state of affairs. I want the best qualified people to treat me and my loved ones. Edit: Seems that the more 'mainstream' crowd (read reddit-esque PC liberals) have arrived at this article and I'm now being downvoted (without any responses or counter arguments). As a result I've been rate-limited and I can no longer post. Cheers!
- pcthrowaway6 11y agoI agree with you in principle, but one thing to keep in mind about the medical community is that there is a legitimate need for broadly diverse medical professionals in a hospital. The reason is for community outreach -- someone of the same background (say, socio-racial-economic) can communicate with the patients easier and have a better outcome for the patients' health. I am sympathetic to the desire for the best qualified people and affirmative action truly does scare me, but medicine does need a bit of special consideration here, in my opinion.
- pcthrowaway450 11y agoYes I agree with the community outreach angle. I'm not sure that outweighs the costs of AA. Imagine your mom is diagnosed with cancer and you take her in for treatment. In walks a black doctor who will be overseeing her care. It is obviously possible that this doctor is just as qualified as any other, but given AA it's also more likely that this doctor - as opposed to a random indian or white or asian doctor - is less qualified. So now what do you do? It's your mom's health on the line here. We're literally talking about peoples' wellbeing potentially being sacrificed to the alter of political correctness.
- thirdtruck 11y agoIgnoring that the black doctor (and his/her children, and their children) may have only been able to escape the cycle of poverty and its innumerable harms to health because of AA.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoSo the author cheated the system, cheated someone else out of a place - and then decided a couple of years down the line he didn't want it anyway. I knew going into reading that I was going to come away thinking the guy was a dick but he's an even bigger dick than I suspected.
- ajkjk 11y agoHm, that's pretty unfair criticism. Lots of people leave med school for lots of reasons. It would have been hard for him to know he was going to do that at the time he was applying.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoOf course, dropping out isn't the issue. It's that he cheated to take that place from someone and the fact he didn't even use it just makes it seem worse.
- taeric 11y agoI don't understand the point of these style articles. If you were to look at the ridiculous volume of black people that were basically forced to pass as white in order to live, that really robs this story of its bite. So, yes. Some people today can abuse the system for advantage. The system this was built to counterbalance was far far worse. And... I question whether it has actually been fully dismantled, yet.
- invisible_dust 11y agoAnything that is not equality based is morally offensive. There should be no racial advantage to getting into college because that in itself is racist.
- mikeash 11y agoThat's fine, but understand that race-based preferences are an attempt to even the score, not make things unfair. People who favor things like affirmative action would say that simply being born white gives you a racial advantage to getting into college, so if you think there shouldn't be any racial advantages, you need something like affirmative action. You might disagree with that, but realize that the disagreement lies over what constitutes fairness, not whether racial advantages should be present at all.
- task_queue 11y agoA classic case of "the real racists are the ones who mention race." To address the real problems of continued systemic racism that existed from the founding of our country, we cannot simply put our race blinders on and pretend we're a post racial society. You're ignoring that there are inherent racial advantages in admissions already. It is morally offensive that, as a society, we've proven to be unwavering in our racism until we are forced to address it.
- taeric 11y agoThis assumes that there is no advantage to diversity of race, in and of itself. I don't know if I can claim that there is an advantage, but I do think it is worth finding out. It further assumes that there is not already a giant weighing of the system against certain races, absent this action. Something which is becoming increasingly easy to see as likely false. And then it ignores that overall ideal that all people get education. With no barrier to entry.
- liquidcool 11y agoFriend of mine who was born in the 1940s remarked that due to rampant discrimination, when he was growing up the smart people who weren't racist went to black doctors, since it was so much harder to become one. A great example of the racial divide is the 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? In it, two parents are concerned for their daughter's happiness as she introduces them to her fiance, played by Sidney Poitier. He's not just a smart, charming doctor - he's the head of the freaking World Health Organization! And they're worried about what a rough time they're going to have as couple!
- yummyfajitas 11y agoBy the same logic, the smart people today who aren't racist will go to Asian doctors.
- meira 11y agoOr to the black doctors.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoYou missed the point. In 1940, black doctors were held to a higher standard than white ones, and would therefore be better on average than white ones. So a non-racist person (i.e., a person who only cares about the quality of care he receives) should seek out a black doctor specifically. Apply appropriate substitutions for 2015.
- meira 11y agoOk, but it is still valid today. It didn't become easy for a black person to be a doctor.
- SG- 11y agoThis story reminds of me this 1986 movie called "Soul Man": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVtsvIpJFTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVtsvIpJFTw
- zxcvcxz 11y agoIsn't discrimination racism? It's strange we live in a world where you have to discriminate to not be racist and those of us who are against discrimination are the racist ones.
- dragonwriter 11y agoNo, racism is one of many possible motivations for discrimination; the two are neither equivalent nor included one within the other.
- chasing 11y agoJust because something takes race into account doesn't make it automatically racist.
- zxcvcxz 11y agoSo would taking race into account and accepting them into a program based on race be racist? What if a restaurant charged some races more and some races less for the same food?
- chasing 11y agoSo the goal of affirmative action is to help provide a little balance. There are plenty of ways to be disadvantaged in our society, but our country has a long history of disadvantaging black people in particular. So race-based affirmative action is one (admittedly imperfect) way of bringing education to a class of people who might otherwise miss out. It's imperfect. There's no getting around that. But it's not racist. It is an attempt to compensate for existing racial biases and historical inequities.
- chasing 11y agoI like how his current business is literally gaming the system for wealthy students so they'll get an unearned edge over the competition. Heaven forbid there should be systems in place to help counter-balance that.
- dataker 11y agoI have experienced something similar between Latino and White. Although I was born and raised in Latin America, my parents are Europeans, so I'm seen as white in the U.S. Whenever I apply to something, there's a quasi-existential dilemma created by such racial division.
- meira 11y agoDisgusting.