Why I faked being black for med school | Hacker News Reader

Why I faked being black for med school

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71 pointsdudul91 comments

I don't understand the point of these style articles. If you were to look at the ridiculous volume of black people that were basically forced to pass as white in order to live, that really robs this story of its bite.

So, yes. Some people today can abuse the system for advantage. The system this was built to counterbalance was far far worse. And... I question whether it has actually been fully dismantled, yet.

Anything that is not equality based is morally offensive. There should be no racial advantage to getting into college because that in itself is racist.

That's fine, but understand that race-based preferences are an attempt to even the score, not make things unfair. People who favor things like affirmative action would say that simply being born white gives you a racial advantage to getting into college, so if you think there shouldn't be any racial advantages, you need something like affirmative action.

You might disagree with that, but realize that the disagreement lies over what constitutes fairness, not whether racial advantages should be present at all.

A classic case of "the real racists are the ones who mention race."

To address the real problems of continued systemic racism that existed from the founding of our country, we cannot simply put our race blinders on and pretend we're a post racial society.

You're ignoring that there are inherent racial advantages in admissions already.

It is morally offensive that, as a society, we've proven to be unwavering in our racism until we are forced to address it.

This assumes that there is no advantage to diversity of race, in and of itself. I don't know if I can claim that there is an advantage, but I do think it is worth finding out.

It further assumes that there is not already a giant weighing of the system against certain races, absent this action. Something which is becoming increasingly easy to see as likely false.

And then it ignores that overall ideal that all people get education. With no barrier to entry.

Point of clarification: The New York Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the same reactionary owner Fox News, so you have to keep that in mind when looking at the editorial point of view.

I would also say that if you look at something like police shootings or even the ability hail a cab in NYC that racism is far from dead. It's also important to point out that racism against those from Africa isn't limited to the United States and there is a great deal of it in Asia:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/opinion/roy-the-wrong-kind...

And Australia. Well, one should not be astonished about Oz if her govt would even demolish the homes of her first nation people or Aboriginals. How much more the Africans that look like them! Oz men and women stare at blacks in general like where in the world do people look like these AND won't this animal harm me.

Friend of mine who was born in the 1940s remarked that due to rampant discrimination, when he was growing up the smart people who weren't racist went to black doctors, since it was so much harder to become one.

A great example of the racial divide is the 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? In it, two parents are concerned for their daughter's happiness as she introduces them to her fiance, played by Sidney Poitier. He's not just a smart, charming doctor - he's the head of the freaking World Health Organization! And they're worried about what a rough time they're going to have as couple!

By the same logic, the smart people today who aren't racist will go to Asian doctors.

Or to the black doctors.

You missed the point. In 1940, black doctors were held to a higher standard than white ones, and would therefore be better on average than white ones. So a non-racist person (i.e., a person who only cares about the quality of care he receives) should seek out a black doctor specifically.

Apply appropriate substitutions for 2015.

Ok, but it is still valid today. It didn't become easy for a black person to be a doctor.

So the author cheated the system, cheated someone else out of a place - and then decided a couple of years down the line he didn't want it anyway. I knew going into reading that I was going to come away thinking the guy was a dick but he's an even bigger dick than I suspected.

Hm, that's pretty unfair criticism. Lots of people leave med school for lots of reasons. It would have been hard for him to know he was going to do that at the time he was applying.

Of course, dropping out isn't the issue. It's that he cheated to take that place from someone and the fact he didn't even use it just makes it seem worse.

I have experienced something similar between Latino and White.

Although I was born and raised in Latin America, my parents are Europeans, so I'm seen as white in the U.S.

Whenever I apply to something, there's a quasi-existential dilemma created by such racial division.

I like how his current business is literally gaming the system for wealthy students so they'll get an unearned edge over the competition.

Heaven forbid there should be systems in place to help counter-balance that.

This story reminds of me this 1986 movie called "Soul Man":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVtsvIpJFTw

Disgusting.

Isn't discrimination racism? It's strange we live in a world where you have to discriminate to not be racist and those of us who are against discrimination are the racist ones.

No, racism is one of many possible motivations for discrimination; the two are neither equivalent nor included one within the other.

Just because something takes race into account doesn't make it automatically racist.

So would taking race into account and accepting them into a program based on race be racist?

What if a restaurant charged some races more and some races less for the same food?

So the goal of affirmative action is to help provide a little balance. There are plenty of ways to be disadvantaged in our society, but our country has a long history of disadvantaging black people in particular. So race-based affirmative action is one (admittedly imperfect) way of bringing education to a class of people who might otherwise miss out.

It's imperfect. There's no getting around that. But it's not racist. It is an attempt to compensate for existing racial biases and historical inequities.

Affirmative action is bad because jerks like the author will do totally unethical things to abuse it, and the same jerks will be resentful of other minorities that affirmative action helps? If this is the best he can come up with arguing against affirmative action, well maybe affirmative action is actually ok.

Yeah, the only way an individual who isn't black is harmed by affirmative action is if they were only going to get some opportunity by a hair anyway.

This tugs at the complex notion of, "well represented minorities". The reason the author didn't get an edge for being of Indian descent is because Ivy League schools and top-paying careers have a representation of Indian and Asian Americans that is much nearer (without claiming to have memorized numbers) their portion of the overall populace than African Americans and Latinos, and Affirmative Action is about breaking the glass ceiling.

For the record, I think it's a complicated subject, and we can always do better than the status quo.

But this article is not helping the cause of those that want to end affirmative action; it identifies their cause with jerks.

> Yeah, the only way an individual who isn't black is harmed by affirmative action is if they were only going to get some opportunity by a hair anyway.

That's the source of my fascination with university anti-affirmative action activists: their cases in court rest on the claim that they were less qualified than every single person of an identical racial designation that was actually accepted to the school.

I don't see how that's relevant.

If you actually read the article, it says he stated his social background precisely on the application. They chose to ignore it and focused on the amount of melanin in his skin.

Isn't that the definition of affirmative action?

It's the definition of racism for sure!

I would argue the problem with AA is not that people might abuse it, but because its a fundamentally flawed system that starts to prefer certain races to one another. For instance, asians are definitely a minority in the US but are extremely heavily discriminated against when applying to colleges. There is even a lawsuit against harvard right now that shows how harvard denied many asian students in favor of other minority's.

So, thats one issue with AA. The other is simply that fields like medicine should have only the best of the best getting through. Why should a native american kid who did shitty all through high school get to go to med school and a asian kid who got a perfect 4.0 and did extra curricular things not. This is making america worse and in many cases further pushes a racial divide agenda that says "minority's cant hack it in the real world".

What is worrying is that the truly great minority leaders/thinking/doers/etc.. will have their accomplishments completely invalidated by their non-minority peers for thinking they got to where they are just because of their racial makeup.

Just to see the above in action, look at this reddit thread : https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/2zun6p/accepted_int...

I agree with you that liability for abuse is not a significant problem with AA. I am not convinced one way or the other on the overall cost/benefit, but lean in favor of AA because it helps with my white guilt.

Don't worry Dan, the word 'minority' has been redefined to not include Asians.

I was informed of this the other week by an Asian friend who's a college student. She mentioned it in passing like it was just basic knowledge.

People use the term "NAM", or non-Asian minority, to separate out minorities who are affirmative-action target populations from non-Whites as a whole.

When's the last time an unarmed Asian youth was gunned down in the streets by police officers?

When was the last time a huge unarmed criminal Asian youth tried to take the gun from a police officer?

Maddox put forward a interesting question about women getting paid less then men- He said "You know how I know that this is bullshit? Because if there was a way companies could instantly save 30% of their wages and get the same output, who in their right minds wouldn't do it"

My thoughts on the actual issue are sadly ill-informed, but the logic here seems problematic: "People say X phenomenon occurs. You know how I know it doesn't? Because it seems like it would benefit the people in charge!"

Did I mis-understand the quote?

The implication is that companies would only hire women, as they are cheaper than men.

That's the idea. The problem is that it ignores other consequences. A company might save 30% on wages by hiring only women, and then find themselves with no clients because all of the potential clients are sexist.

For a more concrete example, consider the old South, and whether stores there unfairly discriminated against black people. The equivalent argument would be: this is obvious bullshit, because if there was a way companies could instantly expand their customer base by 30% (or whatever the proportion of black people living in the South was), who in their right minds wouldn't do it! This argument ignores the fact that a store which admits black people might lose a large portion of their white clientele.

Of course, the 30% figure is wrong. Women do earn 30% less than men, but not for the same work. Most of the earnings gap is because women work different jobs than men. There is a wage gap for the same jobs, but it's substantially smaller. But the fact that the conclusion happens to be correct doesn't make the argument not nonsense.

Of course AA is flawed, but the status quo is flawed too. That's the point of AA. It's supposed to be a counter weight to structural imbalances in order to let minorities get a foot in the door with the hopes that in the future it will not be necessary.

Note that I'm not claiming that AA works or is for the best, I really don't know. But just that you can't have this discussion honestly without acknowledging that there are subconscious biases working against certain groups of people. The whole basis of Maddox's quote assumes that people are objective and have no biases—that's a myth, just like the idea that all players in an economy have perfect information and are rational.

This is where the whole "check your privilege" thing comes in. From one white man to another, we are not qualified to judge how much hard work and talent is required for a woman or a black person to succeed and be recognized.

You could achieve just as much, and more, by using affirmative action to target people who are actually disadvantaged, i.e. the poor. It would target mostly the same people (blacks and hispanics), but not thosethat don't need assistance. Obama, a black man, surely needs help from the government much less than the genious poor white kid from the ghetto. Plus, it's not racist, so you win twice!

This is such a weak argument. It's misleading to include white people in the discussion of affirmative action, because, almost paradoxically, the program only strengthens the white-power hierarchy.

There are millions of things we can do to reduce racial inequality that don't involve discrimination against Asians: ending the drug war and funding rehabilitation programs, reducing police brutality and discrimination, ending for-profit prisons, voting rights for previously convicted, quality hospitals and healthcare access for the poor, funding mental health programs in urban neighborhoods, monitoring and reducing discrimination against colored people in the court systems, actually investing in poorer neighborhoods, funding quality public transportation, seriously funding low-income schools, enacting regulations against companies that take advantage of the poor (payday loans, for-profit colleges). The list goes on and on and on.

Affirmative action has effectively increased the white power structure in this country by reducing the power of Asians, while simultaneously used a delaying tactic for real justice for poor African Americans.

Otherwise interesting comment, but "colored people"? Seriously? Maybe you meant "people of color"? The former is evocative of Jim Crow, the latter a common term used by both races today.

Of course there are biases against minorities. It's a big problem, particularly with respect to police violence.

However, if you want to completely derail a reasonable discussion with a white male, just use that phrase: "check your privilege".

It'll work every time, guaranteed.

I'm open to listening to reasonable arguments for or against AA, but I'm not going to be told "check your privilege" by anyone and continue to take them seriously; "check your privilege" is a phrase which erases the individual and invalidates any personal struggles they may have gone through (extreme poverty, abuse, disability, learning disability, etc.).

Even by itself, "privilege" is a really terrible, loaded word. People like George Bush are privileged -- most white people are not.

Privilege is relative in general, not just relative to you. Somebody is to you as you are to George Bush.

I apologise if what I just typed seems obvious, but it seems to contradict your assertion that only Presidents of the United States of America are privileged.

> I apologise if what I just typed seems obvious,

No need to apologize, since what you've typed is far from obvious. To begin with, I did not assert that only Presidents are privileged. Not even close. For example, I would consider neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama to come from privilege like George Bush. And George Bush would have been privileged whether or not he was president. I would have thought that was obvious.

And if you're going to dive into relativity of life suckiness, they surely the white refugee child from a poverty-stricken family in the Caucasus, whose mother and father have been gunned down and most of her village killed, would be relatively unprivileged compared to almost any American, regardless of skin color. Same for the refugee child from war-torn Afghanistan, usually ranked as one of the very poorest and unhealthiest countries in the world, unless you decide to exempt South Asians from the magical category of "privileged".

>People like George Bush are privileged

I had to pick some meaning for this phrase to have. The 'like' here is problematic, because we are all like George Bush in many ways.

What did you mean to say here?

>And if you're going to dive into relativity of life suckiness, they surely the white refugee child from a poverty-stricken family in the Caucasus, whose mother and father have been gunned down and most of her village killed, would be relatively unprivileged compared to almost any American, regardless of skin color. Same for the refugee child from war-torn Afghanistan, usually ranked as one of the very poorest and unhealthiest countries in the world, unless you decide to exempt South Asians from the magical category of "privileged".

Yes, these are people who would think that you or I are privileged. I'm wondering why you think they're wrong.

> extreme poverty, abuse, disability,

This was me and, in America, I am still more privileged than a black person in my position when it comes to education, loans, work, law enforcement and discrimination in general.

You have no way of knowing whether or not this is true.

The way people come to the conclusion it's harder for black people to get loans is to throw out all the traditional lending criteria like credit history, income, and assets.

I[0] don't[1]? [2]

[3] [4]

[5]

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/bla...

[1] http://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/2015/05/27/blacks-leas...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/nyregion/15subprime.html?e...

[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/minorities-more-lik...

[4] http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/02/09/Study-shows-its-mo...

[5] http://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/news/local/well-off-b... dayton specific

Nope. Like I said. You can only get there by ignoring lending standards.

EDIT: Did you even read the links you posted, or did you just do a quick Google search and copy links without reading?

>Even by itself, "privilege" is a really terrible, loaded word. People like George Bush are privileged -- most white people are not.

Yep. It's the apex fallacy.

> However, if you want to completely derail a reasonable discussion with a white male, just use that phrase: "check your privilege".

This is a typically a response of frustration when said white male does not realize that his entire worldview is shaped by never having experienced the situations that lead to the other's viewpoint.

If you want to have empathy sometimes you need to swallow your pride and just shut up and listen for a while. Because, frankly, no matter how much you believe in your own intellectual honesty, if you are a white male you don't know what it's like to be a woman or an oppressed minority, and you are better off for it. To say that only upper crust trust-fund twits like George Bush are privileged and all other white people have no privilege demonstrates that you emphatically do not understand what white male privilege is.

Sure it hurts to be dehumanized that way, but guess what, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the dehumanization that any black man in a major US city has experienced by the time he turns 18.

From one white man to another, we are not qualified to judge...

Why would you assume that an unknowable piece of information somehow supports one position over another?

And why doesn't this go the other way also - why aren't non-Asian minorities unqualified to judge how much hard work and talent is required for an Asian to succeed?

fields like medicine should have only the best of the best getting through

I'd like to offer up the contrarian view. In music or basketball there is no way to arrive at the top unless you began studying your craft at the age of 3. Unlike high-level basketball or music at a very high level, medicine is quite plebeian, just watch your physician do his thing next time you get sick.

In everyday medicine good enough is in fact good enough, you don't need the very best to advance the state of the art. If it wasn't the case we'd hear that <insert ethnicity here> physicians are dangerous to life, and we'd see them lose their licenses more often than average.

Since you bring up basketball, should we have AA there also? I feel like asians, native americans and jews are being extremely discriminated against in the sport. Or is it OK to say 'fuck those other minoritys' in that case? If a applicant is jewish but misses 50% more freethrows over another identical black candidate, who should get the spot?

We all have to make decisions with imperfect information. That can be assumed outright with little contention.

Yes, AA is fundamentally flawed, but that is because it is a biasing correction to a pre-existing and difficult to manage bias. You might be tempted to think "if the goal is to eliminate bias, you shouldn't introduce more bias" but the fact is, a counter bias can mitigate another. No, it won't work in a utopia, but we don't live in a utopia. And maybe it can't even help create one. But it doesn't actually prevent any progress.

> "What is worrying is that the truly great minority leaders/thinking/doers/etc.."

Well, don't worry about the truly great leaders, thinkers, and doers. They are truly great, so they will overcome. It is results that make one great, not rewards.

Prove that there is in fact a 'bias' and not simply a reflection of the number of blacks and latinos who have the aptitude to become a doctor.

There is nothing about being a doctor that requires one to be a particular race or gender.

There is a pretty easy way to eliminate bias in medical school admissions: blind applications.

This is widely cited as a success for orchestral auditions (which resulted in women being hired at a higher rate) and a demonstration that bias exists, yet strangely the solution is opposed by most activists. It's almost as if those same activists are afraid a blind application process might reveal admissions are biased the other way for medical schools.

The problem is not a matter personal/selection bias, but of historical or cultural bias.

I.e., if some communities are given poorer educations, they will naturally perform worse when tested against it. The solution is not to exclude them from opportunities that value education, because then they will be incentivized to avoid furthering their educations. Additionally, a small amount of fear can cause a lot of damage.

If people have an impression that they can't get accepted because of their race, they tend to avoid even trying, which results in undervalued education, and more unqualified minorities. AA in this sense provides a measure of reassurance. (Even if people are racist, you may still get a job in spite of that, so you might as well still put in the effort.) Which is better than fostering whole minority culture that has given up on success. Because that tends to lead to crime, selfishness, and hopelessness.

Secondly, the goal isn't simply to hire the top performers. That's short-sighted. The goal is to produce a better performing society in the long run. To do that, your orchestra will have to hire worse performers for now.

...historical or cultural bias.

What you describe is not bias, it's some groups being actually less qualified.

Further, you don't even get the incentives right. If the message sent is "we let anyone qualified in without even looking at who you are", that provides incentives for anyone to acquire education.

If people have an impression that they can't get accepted because of their race, they tend to avoid even trying,

Given that Asians can't get accepted because of their race, yet keep trying, that doesn't appear to be true.

If your theory is true, at what point do you expect Asians to avoid even trying? When that point occurs and Asians don't avoid trying, will you change your views?

>What you describe is not bias, it's some groups being actually less qualified.

They are less qualified due to historical and cultural bias, not due to their race or gender.

As to the rest of your post: I disagree. Maybe it's time for you to bring out some reliable studies, because I am really not going to take your word for it.

What, specifically, do you disagree with or want a study for?

The claim that race-blind procedures generate identical incentives for identical black/asian students? That's not a study, it's a 2 line proof that could go on any econ 101 midterm.

If outcome(x.copy(race=asian))=outcome(x.copy(race=black)) for all x, then U(outcome(x.copy(race=asian)))=U(outcome(x.copy(race=black))) for any utility function U, thus marginal utilities (i.e. incentives) must also be identical.

Similarly, I'd be unable to come up with a study proving that d/dx x^2 = 2x. I guess you'd disagree with that claim too?

First, drop the bad attitude. I already know calculus, so obviously I won't disagree with what I already know.

But this:

> If the message sent is "we let anyone qualified in without even looking at who you are", that provides incentives for anyone to acquire education.

and this:

> Given that Asians can't get accepted because of their race, yet keep trying

I don't know to be true. So yeah, you'd need to prove them to me before I agree to them.

I gave you the proof of the former in the message you just replied to. It's not a citation, it's merely two lines of econ 101 math.

I'm not going to bother googling for the latter, since I'm sure that will be ignored as well.

Your equation doesn't actually capture human behavior, you know.

We aren't talking behavior, we are talking incentive. If you want to argue that different races behave differently in response to the same incentives, be my guest.

Perhaps leveling the playing field at the primary school level would do more good than introducing yet more racism higher up. As it is, the way we fund our primary schools perpetuates downward spirals and we are still talking about Affirmative Action as if it HASNT failed in almost all its predictions from decades ago. At some point, programs have to achieve measurable results or be stopped or reformed, not perpetuated for no good reason than "feeling good" that we are "doing something".

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wherewestand/reports/finance/how-do-...

The solution to racism is to institutionalize treating people as individuals and providing them with equal opportunity early on.

"Why should a native american kid who did shitty all through high school get to go to med school and a asian kid who got a perfect 4.0 and did extra curricular things not."

Maybe because you decide Native American was the safest race to use in your example? Also, your example is pretty much BS since you still have to make the school test minimums even with AA, and a Native American who did "shitty" isn't going to apply anyway.

I am not knowledgable in race issues, but I can speak about students going to university from schools with lower average grades.

A student with BBB (for example) from a bad school will (on average) get a higher final degree score than a student with BBB from a very good school. This (to me) is not a surprise. Therefore universities sometimes offer lower grades to students based on their school, under the expectation the students will do as well at university.

Seems that there's a pipeline of affirmative action programs throughout the medical profession starting with admission to college and ending at the hospital where there are quotas for hiring black and latino doctors.

That's an absolutely terrifying state of affairs.

I want the best qualified people to treat me and my loved ones.

Edit: Seems that the more 'mainstream' crowd (read reddit-esque PC liberals) have arrived at this article and I'm now being downvoted (without any responses or counter arguments). As a result I've been rate-limited and I can no longer post. Cheers!

I agree with you in principle, but one thing to keep in mind about the medical community is that there is a legitimate need for broadly diverse medical professionals in a hospital. The reason is for community outreach -- someone of the same background (say, socio-racial-economic) can communicate with the patients easier and have a better outcome for the patients' health.

I am sympathetic to the desire for the best qualified people and affirmative action truly does scare me, but medicine does need a bit of special consideration here, in my opinion.

Yes I agree with the community outreach angle.

I'm not sure that outweighs the costs of AA.

Imagine your mom is diagnosed with cancer and you take her in for treatment. In walks a black doctor who will be overseeing her care. It is obviously possible that this doctor is just as qualified as any other, but given AA it's also more likely that this doctor - as opposed to a random indian or white or asian doctor - is less qualified.

So now what do you do? It's your mom's health on the line here.

We're literally talking about peoples' wellbeing potentially being sacrificed to the alter of political correctness.

Ignoring that the black doctor (and his/her children, and their children) may have only been able to escape the cycle of poverty and its innumerable harms to health because of AA.

There's that explicit pipeline for marginalized people. However, there's long been a much more powerful implicit pipeline in the form of unconscious biases, old boys' clubs, and the like.

The old boy's club consisting of Asians, Indians, and Whites?

Isn't there a pending lawsuit even now about Asian engineers being categorically passed over for management promotions in favor of their white peers?

The problem with the old boys's club is that it's essentially networking. In other words Japan Finland and China all would have this and is has little to do with bias. It's basically networking.

Yes there are exclusionary clubs which bar specific classes of minorities but on the whole they don't work that way. It's like saying frats are biased. Yes they are and the world would be better off without frats and their counterparts elsewhere, but I don't think they are mainly perpetuating racial discrimination. Rather they work as a job network and business network for their members.

I could be wrong. If so illustrate.

Have ... have you missed all the recent news of frats being sanctioned and branches even being closed down for racist behavior?

There was one frat in the south that was paying an old black man just to pick cotton. Seriously!

That's a good point. There indeed are some which exhibit this behavior, but that's not their main purpose. the purpose is to create networks. the same with black fraternities. They create networks for their members to plug into.

Yes, we know many of them engage in peripheral racist and misogynistic behavior, but those things are sideshows.

My point is forming these groups which foment cohesion and support for their members are rather common across cultures so to paint them as 'old boys's' networks is a misunderstanding of human nature.

Basically networks may be used to keep the other out --but that's not why or how they are formed. They are formed out of human nature to form groups which help their members --not that different from community groups, or PTAs, etc.

And this means I should accept a statistically inferior doctor to treat my heart attack... why?

"statistically inferior" is meaningless when it comes to individual capability.

Exactly. "Women are shorter than men on average," but that doesn't make a 7'2" woman any shorter in absolute terms.

Exactly. I can look at a 7'2" woman and see that she's tall.

What do I know about medicine? If my life depended on picking a tall person hidden behind a screen, would I choose a woman or a man?

This is what's stupid about so-called "affirmative action". They've set the situation up such that it's rational to make sure your doctor is white or east Asian.

Not really. Sure, statistics on whole populations favor whites and asians when it comes to test scores. But any doctor you may come in contact with has passed many tests of knowledge and ability at all levels of their education and career. They have seen many patients, have not had their medical license revoked, can still receive medical insurance, so on and so forth. Such a selection of individuals will not follow the distribution of intelligence one sees in the general population. At this point you are just as likely to have a crackpot white doctor as a crackpot black doctor.

No, I don't think so. Some people are more intelligent than other people, and it flows through to all their endeavors.

> I want the best qualified people to treat me and my loved ones.

No, you really don't. You want a team of the best doctors and nurses. "Best" is not the same as "best qualified".

> I want the best qualified people to treat me and my loved ones

Blacks and latinos want the same. The problem is that the best qualified people is not an absolute term. It changes with the situation and often means 'people like me'.

A thousand years ago a raped or abused woman had to be examinated by a male doctor; currently most female victims of domestic violence will feel much more comfortable talking and being examinated by a female physician if available.

Children are typically very stressed in hospitals. A black boy with a broken arm tend do trust easier a black young physician and is less traumatic for him. The old white male doctor could not be the right people for this particular job. In fact could be seem as unpolite or creepy by people with a different culture.

This is a solid reason for having different people in your team that can navigate by the pitfalls of the different cultures without being unintentionally rude. This makes the life in the hospital much easier for all.

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