For Pete's sake...
Eastern Virginia Medical School spent $368,000 investigating how a picture of someone in blackface got into their yearbook. Their 1984 yearbook. Part of the point of going to school is that you're away from your family, and can act like a drunken, unwashed asshat. That freedom lets you learn why mom, dad, and most of the adults in your life don't act that way.
There are good, decent people all over the world who will die tonight because there's no doctor anywhere near their village, or because their doctor doesn't have some essential drug and can't get it (if he even can afford it) in time. It costs about $200k to train a doctor. For $368k, EVMS could educate a doctor and send him to Haiti, Africa, or some place like that for five years, with enough left over to pay his clinic's operating expenses, and supplement what his patients are able to pay so as to provide him enough to live on. At the end of that time, he'd be an American-educated general practice MD, with no debt whatsoever*. Good prospects would jump at that. I'm reasonably sure even that people in Haiti, Africa, etc., are broad-minded enough to tolerate a doctor who came from a school that had a student who dressed in blackface 35 years ago.
* But that won't happen, of course, because our delicate sensitivities have been outraged, and soothing our feelings is far more important than saving the lives of third-worlders. If you want an example of "privilege", I doubt that you'll find a better one.
Original posted at https://rain-gryphon.dreamwidth.org/110688.html
There are good, decent people all over the world who will die tonight because there's no doctor anywhere near their village, or because their doctor doesn't have some essential drug and can't get it (if he even can afford it) in time. It costs about $200k to train a doctor. For $368k, EVMS could educate a doctor and send him to Haiti, Africa, or some place like that for five years, with enough left over to pay his clinic's operating expenses, and supplement what his patients are able to pay so as to provide him enough to live on. At the end of that time, he'd be an American-educated general practice MD, with no debt whatsoever*. Good prospects would jump at that. I'm reasonably sure even that people in Haiti, Africa, etc., are broad-minded enough to tolerate a doctor who came from a school that had a student who dressed in blackface 35 years ago.
* But that won't happen, of course, because our delicate sensitivities have been outraged, and soothing our feelings is far more important than saving the lives of third-worlders. If you want an example of "privilege", I doubt that you'll find a better one.
Original posted at https://rain-gryphon.dreamwidth.org/110688.html