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Pretend to Be Black to Get into Medical School

Schwartz

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In a new website-slash-pitch for a memoir, Vijay Chokal-Ingam, the brother of comedian Mindy Kaling, reveals that he gamed the system and managed to get into medical school by claiming he was African-American.

Mindy Kaling’s Brother Reveals He Pretended to Be Black to Get into Medical School | Mediaite

That's the strangest thing I've read in a long time. Imagine you live in a country where all people regardless of their nationality, race and religious affiliation enjoy equality and freedom. And now forget it. Remember that you live in America, the land of the free, where everyone is equal but some people still manage to get more rights than you do. What's so special about black people and what's wrong with Indians? I see no difference. We are all citizens of the United States and should be equal to the point race and gender do not play any role.
Luckily I am white. If I were Native American I would be so outraged it could possibly have negative consequences for my reputation. I believe Native Americans are still oppressed, though opression itself looks differently now. You want to protect minorities? OK, then protect every minority, not only blacks.
 
Yea, blacks are the only protected class, okay. :roll:

That aside, Asians don't need any help in the college department.
 
Mindy Kaling’s Brother Reveals He Pretended to Be Black to Get into Medical School | Mediaite

That's the strangest thing I've read in a long time. Imagine you live in a country where all people regardless of their nationality, race and religious affiliation enjoy equality and freedom. And now forget it. Remember that you live in America, the land of the free, where everyone is equal but some people still manage to get more rights than you do. What's so special about black people and what's wrong with Indians? I see no difference. We are all citizens of the United States and should be equal to the point race and gender do not play any role.
Luckily I am white. If I were Native American I would be so outraged it could possibly have negative consequences for my reputation. I believe Native Americans are still oppressed, though opression itself looks differently now. You want to protect minorities? OK, then protect every minority, not only blacks.

Who are they? I never even heard of him or her.

But on to the story. So he didn't qualify as a white man, an Asian, or an Indian-American, or an Asian Indian-American (that's a mouthful) but he did get in as a black? So much for not judging based on skin color.
 
This story is so full of holes and "proves" nothing.

Here's what went wrong:

-He didn't apply to the same schools before he started pretending to be black, so we don't have any way to compare the experience of "JoJo" — the name he used when he was pretending to be African American — to his own experience.
-In any case, he was only admitted to one school after applying to more than 20 — not exactly making the case that things were easy for his black alter ego.
-As Gawker's Brendan O'Connor points out, the crux of his "affirmative action discrimination" argument seems to be that he was "invited to apply" to several schools when he was posing as a black man. Again, we don't know whether he would have been invited if he hadn't been pretending to be black, because he didn't seem to measure this.
-And even if he had been able to prove that schools were more likely to invite black applicants, that wouldn't tell us much about the role of race in the admissions process. Invitations are not required to apply. Plus this is a step that takes place before the actual admissions process, likely to diversify the applicant pool. Even if Chokal-Ingam thinks that type of targeted outreach is unfair, it really has no bearing on debates about affirmative action.
-Further muddling his attempted gotcha moment, he admits that at least one of these invitations to apply — the one from Harvard — was from a family friend who knew he was not black. He writes at his website, "Unfortunately, I have long since lost the original letter from Alvin F. Poussaint, MD, (the father of one of my sister's closest friends) inviting me to apply to the school based on my 'superior' MCAT score. I dropped my application to Harvard, fearing that Alvin would expose me as not black." So he can't even argue that all of the invitations that he was so disturbed by were inspired by his fake race.
-As a bonus strike against his "things were so easy when I was black" argument, after dropping out of the one medical school that accepted him, he was admitted to UCLA's MBA program, using his real name and racial identity. (Does he think he was admitted because he was Indian American? Or because he was male? Or because of some other factor? We will never know.)

And then later he also kinda disproves his own point:
As Gawker points out, he mentions in passing on his website that he noticed a difference here:

My experiences with racism as an African American include being harassed by policy officers and being accused of shoplifting by store clerks, something I had never experienced when I was just another Indian-American doctor's son.
Trying to prove reverse racism, Mindy Kaling
 
This story clearly and obviously proves that Blacks have it at least as easy in the United States as Whites do. :roll:
 
Who are they? I never even heard of him or her.

But on to the story. So he didn't qualify as a white man, an Asian, or an Indian-American, or an Asian Indian-American (that's a mouthful) but he did get in as a black? So much for not judging based on skin color.


Vijay is one of several young Indian [east Indian] comedians to come along and blow away racial barriers, they can "get away" with anything and a lot that would get a white guy jailed.

So this kind of fits, a general one finger salute to the system, "here, see what ass holes you are?"

Seriously, this destroys the socialist myth that AA has merit.
 
Vijay is one of several young Indian [east Indian] comedians to come along and blow away racial barriers, they can "get away" with anything and a lot that would get a white guy jailed.

So this kind of fits, a general one finger salute to the system, "here, see what ass holes you are?"

Seriously, this destroys the socialist myth that AA has merit.

Interesting. What's the sister's claim to fame?
 
This story clearly and obviously proves that Blacks have it at least as easy in the United States as Whites do. :roll:

It would seem easier.

Let's say I have a GPA of 3.3 and he has this 3.1 and gets in because he is "black". My life just got harder than his...
 
It would seem easier.

Let's say I have a GPA of 3.3 and he has this 3.1 and gets in because he is "black". My life just got harder than his...
Only people who never went to college have this mindset.
 
This story is so full of holes and "proves" nothing.



And then later he also kinda disproves his own point:
Trying to prove reverse racism, Mindy Kaling

Hey, I am not going to argue with you about black population as it is and this article in particular. I believe it is just a good example of racial prejudice against certain groups of American population that seems pretty strange to me in the XXI century.
 
I haven't seen this happen and actually work. Nevertheless, people should be cognizant of how ironic affirmative action is. It makes it EXTREMELY difficult now for any white male to get into a good school. Simply look at any Ivy League acceptance rates, and the "minorities" (which have now become the majority) are accepted at laughably higher rates.
 
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