Sunday, April 5, 2015

The older brother of comedienne Mindy Kaling has controversially claimed that he was only accepted into medical school in the late 1990s because he posed as a black man

Writing on his blog, Almost Black, Vijay Chokal-Ingam says that he felt he had to change his appearance to get into the St. Louis University School of Medicine and heavily attacks affirmative action policies in the United States. "I was determined to become a doctor and I knew that admission standards for certain minorities under affirmative action were, let's say… less stringent?" wrote Chokal-Ingam. "I got into medical school because I said I was black. The funny thing is I'm not." Chokal-Ingam admits that his sister did not support him during his social experiment and specifically asked him not to do it. He claims that in 1998 he shaved his head, trimmed his long Indian eyelashes and joined the Organization of Black Students during the process. His change in appearance was so startling that his own fraternity brothers didn't recognize him. "Vijay the Indian-American frat boy became Jojo the African American Affirmative Action applicant to medical school," he said, claiming that Jojo was the middle name he was born with. As an Indian-American with a GPA of 3.1, MCAT of 31 and a member of the South Asian Student Association, he didn't think that he'd get into medical school, but with a change of appearance and switch of student organization, he thought he could get in to some of the top schools in the nation. "I became a serious contender at some of the greatest medical schools in America, including Harvard, Wash U, UPenn, Case Western, and Columbia," he said about the application process. "In all, I interviewed at eleven prestigious medical schools in 9 major cities across America, while posing a black man," he added.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Medical schools in the US accept people just because they claim to be or are actually a black person. Who would have guessed? =:-)

Anonymous said...

It wasn't long ago they told us that "blacks have to be twice as good as whites" to get to the same level. They quietly stopped saying that. Like just about everything else they say it was a lie.