Supposedly the Supreme court was to announce its decision on a variety of cases this June. Well, there’s just one week left. I republish these 3 old posts 24 June (Sunday night) before the upcoming announcements. The affirmative action decision will not make everyone happy. So take these posts as documentation of lived experience which most of you don’t have not as arguments pro or con about the decision.
The first post — “Why affirmative action was necessary” describes the bad old days, going back to 1956. I doubt that most of you have lived through it. Which is not to say Affirmative Action is necessary now. Read it and shudder.
The second post –“Two American (social) Tragedies — describes one unexpected outcome of affirmative action (I knew the woman personally) and yet another even worse.
The third post — A Touching Mother’s Day story with an untouching addendum — describes an ongoing social problem which affirmative action has not and will not touch. It’s pretty harsh and may have caused search engines to partially cancel this blog, but I’m the guy who put in chest tubes on stab wounds and scrubbed in on a variety of trauma cases, and such experience is not to be denied. So cancel if you wish, but that won’t change what is currently happening. It needs to be said
It is likely that the Supreme Court will strike down Affirmative Action. Since I’m far older than most of the readership, I’m republishing part of an old post which describes just how necessary affirmative action was. That’s not to say it is necessary now (about which more in a future post).
Fall 1956: Enter Princeton along with 725+ others. The cast of characters included about 5 Asians, 1 Indian Asian, no hispanics and/or latinos as I recall, and all of 2 blacks. I was the first to attend from a small (212 kids in 4 grades) NJ High School. I’d never been west of Philly, and immediately appreciated what passed for diversity back then — a roommate from Florida, and 2 guys next door from Wisconsin and Tennessee, the four of us packed like sardines into two miniscule rooms (each of which is now a single).
Although my High School was above the Mason Dixon line, there was only 1 black student in all 4 classes when I was there. A 2nd cousin who graduated 6 years before I entered, noted that there were NO blacks when she was there and asked why, and was told “we don’t encourage them to attend”. To be fair, there were very few black families in the area.
So, because we were musicians, and in the marching band, I got to know one of the blacks. At away games there were postgame parties (what’s the point of having games after all?). Girls would come up to Harvey and tell him that he must meet Virginia, she’s wonderful. etc. etc. Virginia being the black girl at their school, as Harvey was the black boy at ours. There was no condescension involved, and I never saw anyone at Princeton give Harvey a hard time, and we had plenty of southerners. It was the way things were, and we had no idea that things could be different.
Sad addendum 19 November: A classmate responded to the above paragraph — “We did have two Black students in our class, who were openly harassed on the campus; one left early. The second was in Bicker and was offered a bid to Elm club, which according to reports led to the Elm club president punching out one of the Bicker committee members.
Spring 1958: Back at the H. S. The one black girl in the class 2 years behind me was very smart. She graduated as the Salutatorian. However, she should have been the Valedictorian, the powers that be having decided that it wouldn’t do to have a black in that position. That didn’t stop her of course. The high school was so small that it was folded into a regional H. S. the next year. So our little high school has reunions every 5 years or so for anyone who ever went there, and I saw her 40 – 50 years later. She’d become a very high powered R. N. with a very responsible position.
Fall 1960: Harvard Chemistry department. Not a black, not a latino, not an Asian to be found in the grad school (there was one Sikh). I don’t recall seeing any as undergraduates. There were a fair number of Japanese, and Asian Indian postdocs however. Fast forward to the present for what it looks like now — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/the-harvard-chemistry-department-reunion-part-i/.
Fall 1962: Entering Penn Med school — 125 students, one black (a Nigerian) no latinos/hispanics, no asians of any sort, under 10 women. They really can’t be blamed for this, the pipeline was empty.
Summer 1963: Visiting my wife to be at her home in Alexandria Virginia. A drive perhaps 10 – 20 miles south toward Richmond finds restaurants with Colored entrances.
2008: My wife has a cardiac problem, and the cardiologists want her to be on coumadin forever, to prevent stroke. As a neurologist having seen the disasters that coumadin and heparin could cause when given for the flimsiest of indications (TIAs etc. etc.), I was extremely resistant to the idea, and started reading the literature references the cardiologist gave me, along with where the references led. The definitive study on her condition had been done by a black cardiologist from Kentucky. We had a long and very helpful talk about what to do.
Diversity is not an end in itself, although some would like it to be. I’ve certainly benefitted from knowing people from all over. That’s not the point. Like it or not, intelligence is hereditary to some extent (people argue about just how much, but few think that intelligence is entirely environmental). The parents (and grandparents) of today’s blacks , are likely just intelligent as their MD, Attorney, teacher etc. etc. offspring today. This country certainly pissed away an awful lot of brains of these generations. So clearly, I’m all for letting the best into our elite institutions whatever they look like.
Two American (social) tragedies
When the team members entered the clinic, they were appalled, describing it to the Grand Jury as ‘filthy,’ ‘deplorable,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘very unsanitary, very outdated, horrendous,’ and ‘by far, the worst’ that these experienced investigators had ever encountered. There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets. All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff – long before Gosnell arrived at the clinic – and staff members could not accurately state what medications or dosages they had administered to the waiting patients. Many of the medications in inventory were past their expiration dates… surgical procedure rooms were filthy and unsanitary… resembling ‘a bad gas station restroom.’ Instruments were not sterile. Equipment was rusty and outdated. Oxygen equipment was covered with dust, and had not been inspected. The same corroded suction tubing used for abortions was the only tubing available for oral airways if assistance for breathing was needed…”[29]
[F]etal remains [were] haphazardly stored throughout the clinic– in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers… Gosnell admitted to Detective Wood that at least 10 to 20 percent… were probably older than 24 weeks [the legal limit]… In some instances, surgical incisions had been made at the base of the fetal skulls. The investigators found a row of jars containing just the severed feet of fetuses. In the basement, they discovered medical waste piled high. The intact 19-week fetus delivered by Mrs. Mongar three months earlier was in a freezer. In all, the remains of 45 fetuses were recovered … at least two of them, and probably three, had been viable.”
A classic back alley abortion mill, except that it was all quite legal.
This wasn’t supposed to happen after Roe vs. Wade. It is so uncanny that the doc (Kermit Gosnell) convicted yesterday of these 3 infanticides graduated from a med school in Philly (Jefferson) the same year (1966) that I graduated from another (Penn). At the time Philly had 3 more (Hahnemahn, Women’s and Temple).
What is so socially tragic about Gosnell, is that he was one of very few blacks in medical school back then. Our class of 125 at Penn had one, but he was a Nigerian Prince. Whether Gosnell liked it or not he was a standard bearer for what we hoped (at the time) was the wave of the future (it was). For just how very few Blacks were being educated at elite institutions back then please see
https://luysii.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/warren-harvard-and-penn-sanctimony-hypocrisy-and-fraud/
The second tragedy is a black woman M. D twenty or so years younger (Harvard undergrad, Penn Med followed by an MBA from Wharton) who lost her license to practice in NY State after she went off the deep end and became a holistic practioner (or whatever). She treated a new onset juvenile diabetic with diet and juice after which he came to the ER in diabetic ketoacidosis with a sugar over 300.
My father was an attorney as was my uncle, later a judge. They took it very personally when an attorney was disbarred for some malfeasance or another. I feel the same way when this happens to an M. D. Imagine how the black docs must feel about Gosnell, or the idiot, Conrad Murray, who basically killed Michael Jackson with Diprivan.
A Touching Mother’s day story with an untouching addeneum
Yes, a touching mother’s day story for you all. It was 56 years ago (yes over half a century ago ! ! ), and I was an intern at a big city hospital on rotation in their emergency room in a rough neighborhood. The ER entrance was half a block from an intersection with a bar on each corner. On a Saturday night, we knew better than to try to get some sleep before 2AM or until we’d put in 2 chest tubes (to drain blood from the lungs, which had been shot or stabbed). The bartenders were an intelligent lot — they had to be quick thinking to defuse situations, and we came to know them by name. So it was 3AM 51 years ago and Tyrone was trudging past on his way home, and I was just outside the ER getting some cool night air, things having quieted down.
“Happy Mother’s day, Tyrone” sayeth I
“Thanks Doc, but every day is Mother’s day with me”
“Why, Tyrone?”
“Because every day I get called a mother— “
Untouching Addendum
Well, it’s 56 years later and the terrible violence in the Black community continues unabated. Nothing has changed from 1967. Half the murdered people in this country are black with only 1 out of 7 being black. My white neighbors drench themselves in holiness, displaying their virtue for all to see with signs on their lawns saying Black Lives Matter. This neatly avoids facing the real problem — Black Lives Matter except to other Blacks.
Addendum 14 May ’23 As if on command, today’s New York Times magazine has a story about a black woman killed by a white racist in Buffalo. If every black killed by a nonBlack or a police officer even if black) were still alive, murdered blacks as a percentage of those murdered each year would still be close to 50%. This sort of thing is so unhelpful, and probably harmful in taking the focus away from the all to real problem of excessive black deaths.
In fairness to my white neighbors, putting signs on their lawns is about all they can do. Any change in the carnage must come from within the Black community itself, not from well-meaning whites.
Fortunately, there is a hopeful precedent — Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD). When they were founded in 1980, the USA population was 220 million and there were 28,000 drunk driving fatalities. In 2021 our population had grown by 50% to 330 million, with 13,000 drunk driving fatalities. Had nothing changed we would have experienced 42,000 fatalities in 2021 instead of 13,000. MADD simply made drinking and driving socially unacceptable.
