Actress Mindy Kaling’s brother says that he posed as a black man years ago to get into medical school and that the experience opened his eyes to what he calls the hypocrisy of affirmative action.
The revelation comes as Vijay Chokal-Ingam, who is of Indian descent, is pitching a book about his experiences as a “hard-partying college frat boy who discovered the seriousness and complexity of America’s racial problems while posing as a black man.”
On his website,
AlmostBlack.com, Chokal-Ingam says he hatched the plan in 1998after realizing in college that his grades weren’t going to be good enough to get into med school as an Indian-American.
“So, I shaved my head, trimmed my long Indian eyelashes, and applied to medical school as a black man,” he wrote on the website. “My change in appearance was so startling that my own fraternity brothers didn’t recognize me at first.”
He says he joined an organization for black students and applied to schools using his middle name, JoJo.
The plan had some drawbacks, said Chokal-Ingam, who describes himself now as a “professional resume writer, interview coach, and graduate school application consultant.”
“Cops harassed me. Store clerks accused me of shoplifting. Women were either scared of me or couldn’t keep their hands off me,” he wrote. “What started as a devious ploy to gain admission to medical school turned into a twisted social experiment.”
He says it worked. Despite a relatively mediocre 3.1 college grade-point average and a good-but-not-great score of 31 on the Medical College Admission Test, Chokal-Ingam claims he was wooed by several top medical schools.
