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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / This Week In Blackness / Mindy Kahling’s Brother Doesn’t Understand Social Experiments

Mindy Kahling’s Brother Doesn’t Understand Social Experiments

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This certainly proves you’re not your brother’s keeper. Vijay Chokal-Ingam, Mindy Kahling’s older brother, has found himself in the news for his “social experiment.” Realizing that he was most likely not going to get into medical school with his current shoddy grades, he shaved his head, trimmed his eyelashes, went by his middle name of Jojo, and told admissions officers that he was black. The result? He got into one medical school and dropped out after two years. His conclusion?

“Racism is not the answer,” he told the Post, implying that proponents of affirmative action are The Real Racists. “It also promotes negative stereotypes about the competency of minority Americans by making it seem like they need special treatment.” But then again, he writes on his website: 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.

Of course, in order for a social experiment to be an actual experiment you’d have had to apply to the same schools as both yourself and as a black person, something Chokal-Ingam didn’t do. Here’s hoping he doesn’t get a book deal to further profit off of this.

Team Blackness discussed Bobby Jindal’s misguided views on LGBT discrimination, a transgender woman’s horrible experiences in a Georgia men’s prison, and whether TWIB is really run by a Jewish PR organization.

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27Comments

  2. 2.

    Major Major Major Major

    My husband (Asian-American) didn’t start getting interviews for tech jobs until he changed his resume to have a not-technically-real name…

    He switched his first from the given diminutive to the non-diminutive form;
    Removed both middle names;
    And hypenated his last name, with my Irish one coming second.

    Then he started getting lots of callbacks, and a good job in a few weeks, as opposed to no real non-recruiter callbacks for a few of months. Not a real experiment obviously but the results were striking.

  4. 4.

    NorthLeft12

    According to Wonkette he applied to twelve other schools and was rejected by all of them. So, a mediocre med school accepted him and he thinks that proves something? A guy that jumps to conclusions like this based on the data he accumulated would have made a terrible and dangerous doctor anyway. I guess those other schools got it right.

    Mindy Kahling was an actress, producer and director on the TV series The Office, and is now the lead actress on the TV series The Mindy Project. She probably writes, directs, and produces that show too.

  5. 5.

    NonyNony

    @NorthLeft12:

    So, a mediocre med school accepted him and he thinks that proves something? A guy that jumps to conclusions like this based on the data he accumulated would have made a terrible and dangerous doctor anyway. I guess those other schools got it right.

    Now he gets to go on the teevee and be the darker skinned guy that speaks out against affirmative action. With a story tailor-made for the Fox News crowd to eat up with a spoon. We’ll see how he does with the grift – if he’s any good at it he should be able to parlay his success to at least, oh, Ann Coulter levels perhaps?

  6. 6.

    Tenar Darell

    As one of your “Big Jewish” contributors, I have to say, how did they find out? I thought we covered up the funding sources so well. Curses, foiled again! /obligatory mustache twirl

  7. 7.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @NorthLeft12:

    As Elon points out, it would only be a valid experiment if he also applied to those schools under his Indian ethnic identity and was turned down. So far, the only thing he proved is that if you lie on your college applications, you might sneak into a third or fourth-tier school, but you’ll never know if you would have had the same result by not lying.

  8. 8.

    askew

    You should include Mindy’s rep’s response:

    Mindy Kaling’s rep tells Us Weekly: “Mindy has been estranged from her brother for years. She was not aware of his decision to apply to medical school under a different name and race.”

    The brother’s blog is full of bitching about Mindy.

  10. 10.

    Peale

    So I guess the moral of this story is that if you don’t have good grades, you might not be cut out to be a doctor.

  13. 13.

    gvg

    My sister’s experience’s getting into med school was that the personal interview was very important and highly variable on what the person was looking for. Good grades however were required to even get an interview.

    I am not surprised he experienced problems as a presumed black student that he didn’t as something else.

    My own experience as a financial aid counselor at a University is that people really think there are lots of scholarships and aid for minorities. I have been her 20 years and I’ve never seen much $ especially for minorities. 200 here or there for 3 students doesn’t count in a population of 40000 students IMO but the myth persists. I have seen 2 scholarships of several thousand dollars for 2 Native American Indian students from their tribes. On the other hand excellent grades work more reliably.

  14. 14.

    Monala

    @gvg: From a Tim Wise article:

    First, it is simply false that scholarships for people of color crowd out monies for white students. According to a national study by the General Accounting Office, less than four percent of scholarship money in the U.S. is represented by awards that consider race as a factor at all, while only 0.25 percent (one quarter of one percent) of all undergrad scholarship dollars come from awards that are restricted to persons of color alone (1). In other words, whites are fully capable of competing for and receiving any of the other monies — roughly 99.75 percent of all scholarship funds out there for college. Although this GAO study was conducted in the mid-’90s, there is little reason to expect that the numbers have changed since then. If anything, increasing backlash to affirmative action and fear of lawsuits brought by conservatives against such efforts would likely have further limited such awards as a percentage of national scholarships.

    http://www.timwise.org/2011/03/a-bad-year-for-white-whine-college-scholarships-and-the-cult-of-caucasian-victimhood/

  15. 15.

    Hal

    Wasn’t this the plot of Soul Man?

    Also, I understand the importance of grades in the pre-med courses and MCAT scores as a way of screening potential med students who might have difficulty with their med school classes, but I hate the idea that only 4.0 students make good or great Doctors. There is more to being a good doc than your GPA and MCAT score.

  16. 16.

    scav

    And what’s with that Random Fetching Crazy White dude invading Saudi Arabia, an Arabic cultural homeland, bringing with him his alien, contaminate, Los-Angeles-More-than-Reasonably-Educated White Culture, infecting that environment in the Saudi, Islamic culture area, especially when dragging along his Asian wife and totally white bi-racial child? Shouldn’t he be holding the fort in “his” cultural of precious value?

  17. 17.

    Felanius Kootea

    I’m not a physician but I’ve served on a medical school admissions committee. Schools look for a variety of different things in their candidates. Some want a proportion of their applicants to be willing to serve as primary care doctors in medically undeserved areas (inner-city and rural areas in the U.S.). This means that the medical school interview is a very big part of getting admitted (my school does multiple mini interviews). Given a choice between two candidates with similar MCATs and GPAs, the interview can be the difference between one getting admitted versus the other. As an Indian born in Nigeria, he might have seemed attractive to the WUSTL admissions committee. I don’t know how he performed on his med school interviews to get into that one school (out of many that rejected him) but I do know that doctors have to graduate, complete a residency training and pass the boards, not just get admitted. He failed on that score. He seems a mini Dinesh D’Souza in the making: get ahead by punching down, belittling the African-American experience and exploiting the racism of the right. He is off to a fine start.

  18. 18.

    Uncle Ebeneezer

    I didn’t realize Casey Kasem was such a racist/AntiSemite. But he was smart enough to figure out the Big Jewish Conspiracy so bravo to him for putting together all the pieces. –White Traitor Uncle Eb

  19. 19.

    Pogonip

    @Major Major Major Major: Your husband’s tactic reminds me of a way my dad amuses himself. When someone named, say, Katsuyama Hiroyuki or Pyotr Ivanovich Orlov (any non-Irish ethnicity will do) is mentioned on the news, he will announce, “That’s a good old Irish name!”. I will try to remember to tell him that someone found a practical use for the Irish name game!

  20. 20.

    Steve from Antioch

    Yeah, because how could we possibly know what happens when a non-African-American with mediocre grades, mcats, and thin extracurriculars applies to medical school?

  21. 21.

    Pogonip

    @Felanius Kootea: How does a non-doctor end up deciding med school admissions? How many non-doctors are on the committees and why are they are?

    I’d like to see severe pain patients represented if they aren’t already. Doctors are afraid to prescribe needed pain medication, not that I blame them, but maybe getting acquainted with the human face of the problem will give them more courage.

  22. 22.

    MomSense

    How can I get in on this Big Jewish Conspiracy? I have a modicum of decency and would also like to lease a maserati. Actually I’d settle for a honda civic so even a Small Jewish Conspiracy would work for me.

    Man that dude was irritating.

  23. 23.

    Felanius Kootea

    @Pogonip: There are many people who teach medical students that are PhDs and not MDs. They get a say too. The majority of the committee members are MDs though.

  24. 24.

    HeartlandLiberal

    Back in the late 70’s into 1981/82 or so, I was teaching high school. Fortunately, I discovered computers, switched careers, and the rest is history.

    But the English classes I taught, I always found a way to work the book “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin into the year’s reading. My classes were predominately poor urban Blacks, with a still substantial portion of White lower middle class students. Already at that time, many Black kids, who were not even alive when Griffin did his experiment and wrote his book, did not understand the depth of racism in their own history.

    If you have never read “Black Like Me”, I would encourage you to read it. It is the one book that looks at the racism that Blacks in America have and still suffer from the inside out, harshly but truthfully.

    This from Wikipedia.

    Black Like Me is a nonfiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin first published in 1961. Griffin was a white native of Dallas, Texas and the book describes his six-week experience travelling on Greyhound buses (occasionally hitchhiking) throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia passing as a black man. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles.

    Griffin kept a journal of his experiences; the 188-page diary was the genesis of the book.

    At the time of the book’s writing in 1959, race relations in America were particularly strained and Griffin aimed to explain the difficulties that black people faced in certain areas. Under the care of a doctor, Griffin artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.

  25. 25.

    Ryan

    Also, you need a sample size greater than 1. After all, what is being tested here, the race of the individual, or something about the school, and had he applied to a different school, the outcome would be different?

    A sociologist has already probably studied this…

  26. 26.

    amy c

    @Gin & Tonic: She’s the first Indian woman to write, produce and star in her own show on an American broadcast network. That’s a significant achievement even if you’re not into her show. (I find it really uneven, personally, but I watch it anyway.) She made her name writing for, and acting in, “The Office.”

    She also gave a great speech at Harvard Law last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7_49EXuLoQ

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