Turns out Mindy Kaling has an older brother who fancies himself an anti-racist activist. To prove this, he slightly altered his physical appearance in order to appear less Bengali and more African-American. The result? More medical school acceptance letters than not.
According to Vijay Chokal-Ingam’s website Almost Black:
In my junior year of college, I realized that I didn’t have the grades or test scores to get into medical school, at least not as an Indian-American.
Still, 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?
So, I shaved my head, trimmed my long Indian eyelashes, and applied to medical school as a black man. My change in appearance was so startling that my own fraternity brothers didn’t recognize me at first. I even joined the Organization of Black Students and started using my embarrassing middle name that I had hidden from all of my friends since I was a 9 years old.
Vijay, who’s name then became “Jojo,” then applied to and got into several prominent medical schools across the United States. Unfortunately, he also faced some harsher side effects of his adopted transformation:
Not everything worked out as planned. Cops harassed me. Store clerks accused me of shoplifting. Women were either scared of me or couldn’t keep their hands off me. What started as a devious ploy to gain admission to medical school turned into twisted social experiment.
He has received praise and criticism since going public about the stunt. Even so, Vijay stands by his act and the ideas behind it:
Would you rather accept racism or defy those who want to discriminate against you? I chose the latter and applied to medical school as black
— Vijay Ingam (@VijayIngam) April 4, 2015
Just in case you’re about to go all THEY TOOK R’ JOBS on us, Vijay neither went to medical school nor became a doctor. After all, as he says on his website, “Lucky for you, I never became a doctor.”
(Via Daily Mail and Almost Black)