The College Fix

The College Fix covered the story of Vijay Chokal-Ingam, brother to actress Mindy Kaling, who said he got into med school with a 3.1 GPA after pretending to be black on his application. The Indian American is a strong opponent of affirmative action policies.

Now he’s being challenged by an Asian-American student at the University of Chicago for letting whites off the hook for stealing spots from Asian Americans.

Eleanor Hyun writes in The Chicago Maroon that she’s skeptical Chokal-Ingam’s story even holds up – calling several aspects “suspect” – and speculates that he could’ve gotten into med school by pretending to be white:

It is a well-known fact that, with the same MCAT score and GPA, black applicants have a higher chance of getting into medical schools than Asian or white applicants. … What is much less discussed, and much more difficult to justify, is the fact that, with the same MCAT and GPA, white applicants also have a higher chance of getting into medical school than Asian applicants. …

For some reason, it is always imagined that a black or Hispanic student is the one who is “stealing our spot.”

Hyun, the incoming editor in chief of the Maroon, has some charts comparing “underrepresented minority,” white and Asian applicants to med school based on their GPA.

The funny thing is, there are stories of Asians who can pass as white (as a result of being multiracial, for example) trying to do so in admissions. Many opt out of self-identifying as Asian on their applications. However, the story which has now emerged into the national consciousness is the story which pits two minorities against each other—the story of a South Asian man pretending to be black.

Hyun warns Asians not to fall for the crusade led by Edward Blum, whose Project on Fair Representation (now Students for Fair Admissions) is suing Harvard on claims of discriminating against Asian applicants:

Their interests do not lie in representing Asians, but in co-opting Asian voices for their own benefit. And what we see is that this isn’t a minority-versus-minority problem. It has to do with minorities being pitted against each other instead of addressing the actual source of oppression—the majority.

So… let’s fight Whitey together?

To almost exclusively frame discrimination against Asians within arguments about affirmative action is an incredibly narrow-minded approach—so narrow-minded that it only makes sense within the context of sustaining an existing racial pecking order. Discrimination in admissions has to do with much more than, and much beyond, affirmative action. It has to do with the fact that Asians are also a racial minority in America and subsequently face the discrimination that comes along with that status. It has to do with the fact that our accomplishments are dismissed as the products of an academic machine instead of a human being. And that’s something that we definitely should, and need to fight against. But this conflation with arguments against affirmative action is not the way to do it.

Read the op-ed.

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IMAGE: Eleanor Hyun’s Facebook page