It’s been a while.  When you’re a doctor you end up saying that a lot, especially around friends. Like most black folk, after the initial rage at the Trayvon shooting subsides we reflect on our lives and blessings start thinking about other shit we’re mad about. Mine is health disparities.  Perhaps they are related.  I mean if you had a statistical reason to believe that any meal could be your last before being gunned down by a cop or being wrongfully incarcerated perhaps chicken and ribs would be an appropriate diet.   I have no idea what Simon eats (I am a lousy girlfriend) but subconsciously I am sure I don’t worry about it as much because he’s white. How messed up is that?

As I slave away at my fellowship, becoming a full-fledged doctor in my chosen field is within site.  But I am 32. And I am still poor.  My finance major friends are at a point where there investments yield interest that is equivalent to my salary.  But hey, at least I am helping people right? Well sorta.  Patients.  One at a time. Who would be helped by someone else who would have gotten this spot in this fellowship if I didn’t exist.  I would have preferred to work in policy where my work had the potential to help many people and couldn’t have been accomplished by some other shmuck willing to stay in school until they were 40.

I talked to my Mom about this once.  Going into public health.  She replied that a B+ inorganic chemistry was no big deal (in fact it was and I lost the car for a semester).  I mentioned the same thing to my dad who referred me back to my mother. But taking up Benito’s mantle of re-inventing oneself I decided, at this EXTREMELY late time in the game to go back and see if it wasn’t too late.

It’s too late.  Public health folks, particularly those who work closely with Medicaid and other programs don’t much care for doctors.  That’s because Medicaid doesn’t reimburse doctors at as high a rate as private insurance and doctors are forever bitching about it.

Now as I said, I’m poor.  I’ll be 35 before I start making six figures. My financial friends have been making close to seven and my lawyer friends are either dead or close to making partner. It’s time for me to get mine, and hell yes I picked my specialty based on the number of routine procedures I knew insurance wouldn’t question and hell yes I’ll run some unnecessary tests and hell yes I do have my first Mercedes picked out.

When I met a friend from college who still views me as a person and not a doctor we finally got down to some real talk.  Med  school is too long, but it ain’t like law school where you can just lop off a year and nothing happens. To make the medical path shorter college (and perhaps even high school) would need to be severely truncated. Also the government needs to pick up that tab for schooling and offer us docs a couple tax credits on the back end.

But its whatever.  Nothing puts a single death in context like thinking about millions of deaths.  The Supreme Court is about to condemn millions to death because they have a grudge against the President. At least Trayvon’s killer has to live in hiding. Those evil, faux-pious bastards will be lauded for their despicable ruling. I also love how six hours of oral argument over three days is a huge deal and they complain that going through the entire law EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE CLERKS.  But again, it’s whatever.  It’s not like lives are at stake. Oh wait.  Wow, I really hate them.

I have been asked to comment on the recent NY Times piece: To Be Black at Stuyvesant High.  Below are my thoughts:

This is not say there are no benefits to going to a magnet school.  I think it nurtures the sleeping activist in all African-Americans.  There is a certain satisfaction in entering a hostile environment, making eye contact with everyone you see in the halls and affirming your right to exist.

I tried not to write about it.  I didn’t want to be just another liberal blogger uninentionally calling attention to the “birther” movement and thereby adding legitimacy to it in the subconscious minds of many Americans who vote.  When the White House went above and beyond any legal requirement of any American citizen to do anything (not to mention presidential candidate, not to mention sitting president) and released his long-form birth certificate I patted myself on the back for staying out at least one pointless debate.  And now they want his college records.  And of course the birthers are not satisfied with the long-form birth certificate.

So let’s go over what we know.  Birthers are racist, and not the pseudo-intellectual “there exist some gifted negroes but as a race they are intellectually inferior” but the “there are just some things nobody with mongrel blood should ever, ever do and being president is damn sure one of them.” All Republicans, racist or not, know that birthers are racist and deliberately pander to this group for political points by pretending that the birthers really care where Obama was born not as much what he looks like and who he was born to.  Polls indicate that over half of people who identify themselves as Republicans don’t believe Obama is American or aren’t sure.  Believe it or not, I can live with that.  Or rather, I have to – I’m black in America.

But here’s what makes me angry.  It’s the fact that so many people, with nothing to gain to from this slander and libel against the President, don’t get angry and don’t stand up to make any sort of change.  Case in point: If you haven’t struck up a conversation with an acquaintance or stranger about how absurd this birther thing is, then guess what? Black or white, you’ve failed the racism/self-hatred test. 

Ok, let’s back up.  Raise your hand if you’ve overheard a birther talking on the bus or in a bar sounding all authorative like he’s king shit of fuck mountain?  Yeah all right, all of you.  Now, raise your hand if you’ve EVER heard someone DENOUNCING birtherism loudly and in the same manner? Now put your hand down if you’re at a small liberal arts college North of the Mason Dixon line with no division 1 or division 2 athletics.  Yeah, not a single hand raised.

Look people.  It’s 2011.  We know that progress isn’t guaranteed with the passing of time.  We’ve seen slavery, holocaust, genocide and the like.  It’s not just that we know what our primal demons are like, we also know, as people how extremely cowardly we are.  I mean, you won’t come to the defense of the President of the United States? Your President? Supposedly the most powerful person in the world?  If not then guess what, you’re not coming to the defense of the gay kid who is being bullied.  You’re not coming to the defense of the Hispanic-American who is having his citizenship questioned by an angry mob.  Come on people, we need to start controlling how the masses think.

Oh, you’re one of those “you can’t control how people think” people are you?  Ever heard of advertising? Your deepest most sacred convictions are bought, sold, bundled, divided and sold again every day on Wall Street.  Your very concept of what it means to be American is 80% commercials you’ve watched during Major League Sports.

So read a book, figure out what your convictions are, and PLEASE don’t just STAND UP for them if they get attacked in front of you.  Convictions aren’t to be used for self-defense only.  ADVOCATE for them.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hate stupid people as much as the next guy.  But you know what I hate even more?  A coward.

This topic deserves more than the brief illusion I gave to it in a previous post.  The American Civil War had just one cause: slavery.  States Rights is a myth.  Why does that matter 150 years after Fort Sumter? Because the Civil War made Americans who we are today, and in my opinion was simply the final military battle in what is called the American Revolution.  It created a vast country without borders – states because not a body of people but simply a necessary and subservient level of government.  Then of course we have the shame issue.

The shame associated with such a devasted defeat and a disproportionate share of the blame for the greatest atrocity man ever inflicted upon man.  The Civil War was less a war fought to free slaves as it was a war to pay for them.  Lincoln knew this as he said days before his own blood was placed on the alter of freedom with Brown’s and the 625,000 that died in between.  To understand this I offer an analogy.

Suppose eating meat and cheese (aka) animal slavery is wrong.  Who commits the greatest sin? He who keeps a single cow per year, sells the cheese and then slaughters the cow selling the meat, or the man who dines on steak and brie every night, but had never seen a cow in the flesh? Who refuses to even make the association? After the war each side had its own myth to create – The Lost Cause/States Rights folks of the South and the Freedman’s Army in the North.  Ironically, John Brown Free Soilers and Jayhawks are reviled by both sides …everywhere other than Kansas.

But it was the slaves stupid.  Everyone knew it at the time. The founding fathers knew it would come to this.  And somewhere, in their heart of hearts, every American for the last 150 years have known it.  If every mortal deed echoes through eternity, the cannons of the Civil War and still be heard loudly no matter how tightly we cover our ears and try and sing above the noise.

I’m one of those guys who constantly gets accused of making everything about race.  Everything from healthcare to the judiciary system, employment prospects to school admissions.  I’ve had a lot of discussions over a lot of beers and every now and then I get tired of being the only voice answering the meant-to-be rhetorical question underlying all these conversations “ok, you’ve got a black president, what more could you POSSIBLY want?” I begin to doubt myself, just a little, and then I read about Kyle Bristow’s “White Apocalypse,” a novel which the author insists isn’t a racist fantasy and it renews my resolve to at the very least not give the slight nod white people look for after a borderline statement to see if you’re one of those “reasonable” colored folk.  But here’s what’s interesting.  The racist fantasy is also a revenge fantasy.

The novel supposedly begins with the discovery of a mass grave…filled with white people.  Ancient white people who somehow got to the North American continent before Native Americans presumably by crossing a frozen Atlantic Ocean. Then the Native Americans slaughtered them, millenia pass, and suddenly directors of the Southern Poverty Law Center are being assassinated and self-hating white people are exercising their liberal guilt by dating non-whites.  Ok, so obviously Bristow (who sure as hell is no looker) lost a girlfriend (or more likely crush) to a black guy.  Sexual insecurity has long been a hallmark of racism, particularly American racism.

Read on to find out what makes this book extra special

Usually hate fiction involves an apocalyptic future where mongrel races have run wild and basically doomed the world, only to be saved by the Anglo-Saxon protagonist by leading some kind of righteous race war.  Racist manifestos on the other hand usually blame minorities for some kind of downward trend and point to a golden age in the past when said minority was properly subjugated and advocates for a return to that time.  That was a thread that ran through Mein Kampf.

What’s interesting here is that this kid (who is a law student by the way) is basing his hate on a past wrong apparently at the hands of Native Americans.  Perhaps the book also claims that Europeans were once slaves in Africa.  Both claims are equally absurd.  I don’t know and I don’t care to find out.

This illustrates a fundamental shift from hating a group for who they are (the definition of hate in this context when you think about it) and hating a group for something they did even if the claim of wrongdoing is completely erroneous.  It’s not that you think blacks are apes and jews are rats you’re simply trying to even a score.

I mean, does it really matter? You can’t definitively prove equality any more than you can definitively prove events that happened before the written word was common.  But here’s the thing: an admission of a back and forth so to speak is a tacit admission of parity, and parity =/= inferiority.

Let’s put this in basketball terms.  Say the man is the LA Lakers.  The old paradigm says that minorities are LA Clippers.  This new paradigm says minorities are the Boston Celtics.  I’d rather be the Celtics than the Clippers.

So Benito has been trying to recruit an underemployed blogger to join our motley crew, but is failing because obviously none of the candidates want to lose their job. But one of them did pass on a mandatory assignment a senior manager gave to his underlyings before the monthly meeting when they were to pay homage to his greatness. Read “A Letter to Garcia.” Here is the damn link

http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm

I talked to the guy and he said he was hurt that his manager thought so little of them collectively that he would make them read what amounted a treatise on how they were so worthless as to be morally bankrupt human beings. Or at least that’s what he got out of it. You are probably wondering what this has to with Scalia. Getting to that.

My first reaction was this kid is a major loser if his managers have any ability to affect him emotionally. So I read the article…turns out it’s a turn of the (previous) century essay, penned on a lark, a 100 yr-old blog entry that could have been written by Rush Limbaugh. Then I got angry.

It’s hard to accurately summarize this piece of “work” and still capture the condescending arrogance that epitomizes the ruling class of every culture, country and time. Essentially it’s “the white man’s burden” but it’s employer v. Worker. To take this article literally a worker should be an omnipotent, mute slave. Essays could be written about each sentence and books about the handful of parables. I did not think it was possible to degrade a person in so many ways in such few words. I have always prided myself on keeping an emotional distance from employers even when I used to work for corporate America. But if a manager ever told me to read this I’d have spat in his face.

So enraged was I that I googled critiques of the article and guess what? It’s not a rallying cry to conservatism, it’s a commonly accepted piece of Americana adored by all! The idiot manager who assigned this may have just pulled a cliche out of the “Managing for Dummies” handbook!

How? How could the awful sentiment embodied in this hellspawn text be loved AND loved by most? At first I thought maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was messed up. Then I thought of Antonin Scalia.

Here you have an ugly small-minded creature who routinely accepts gifts from interested parties in the cases he hears, asks bullying and unsophisticated questions, writes at a fourth grade level and whose decisions are to the detriment of 94% of Americans. Yet ask a law student who their favorite Justice is? Scalia is by far the most popular. I hate people.

Part of it is somewhat understandable. Scalia’s misleading oversimplified questions and interruption are sometimes funny. The essay is kind of funny in a Mr. Burns sort of way. Also people don’t read. Case in point: Less than 1% of people who use the term “Uncle Tom” have read Uncle Tom’s cabin. The term and it’s meaning makes no sense to anyone who has actually read the book.

But the real reason most people find this abominable essay and the unsufferable Antonin Scalia is a perverted sort of hero worship and inflated sense of self worth.  It’s how Republicans win elections.  People don’t identify with their own situations, they identify with the situations they feel they will be in soon or someday.  The rich are given tax cuts by the wannabe rich.  Students worship asshole professors because they want to be perceived as part of the in crowd who managed to earn A’s.  Workers who are insulted by this essay love it because they are self-hating, because they want to be no not “Rowan” (the idiot who takes the damn message) but because they want to be the commander and chief who sends him.  All little kids want to be President.  The sidekick action figure never sells as well as the leader.  In this world a hero is just a martyr who survives or gets noticed dying.

I am not the biggest fan of kids.  I did my rotation through pediatrics and was told I’d be a good pediatrician because I didn’t let emotions get in the way of medicine, and because children are more comfortable with a female doctor.  Pass.  One of the things I did notice though was that there were alot of fat kids.  Half of the kids were in my humble opinion fat enough to be the “fat” kid in their respective class, the one with no friends that everyone poked fun at.  My thought is that an anti-obesity campaign is so benign as to be almost useless.  Michelle Obama is a beautiful, empowered, intelligent woman who could raise awareness about any number of issues.  Then I heard about Rush Limbaugh, a morbidly obese, fat drug addict, attacking the first lady over her anti-obesity campaign.  This indicates the type of bald-faced hatred that still permeates a great deal of the 48% of the country that did not vote for Obama.

I do not know exactly why I found Limbaugh’s commentary to be so much more offensive than Sarah Palin’s similar comments.  Palin constantly goes out of her way to take shots at the first lady, going as far as to dedicate a plate of smores to her in the defiant act of eating dessert.  Sadly, I suspect the reason for this is that Sarah Palin, who is losing her battle with age, is still in far better shape than Rush Limbaugh.  The hypocrisy of a man who can lose well over 50 lbs and not look any different criticizing someone for combating childhood obesity cuts through my political apathy and strikes me as absurd.  It also demonstrates that I was wrong about two things.  First, that the first lady should have taken on something more concrete, and two, that childhood obesity isn’t such a big deal.

Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama are very similar.  Beautiful, brilliant, ambitious – but when Hillary was first lady these traits were used against her.  She was attacked for it.  I can still remember in middle school seeing the bumper stickers that read “Impeach Clinton and her Husband.”  Michelle Obama learned from history and purposefully chose something seemingly innocuous and adopted the middle America friendly moniker “Mom in Chief.”  But is childhood obesity really that innocuous?

The fat kids I met were not the fat kids I remember from school.  They didn’t play video games 20 hrs a day, didn’t have chocolate constantly smeared on his faces, liked and were good at sports.  Well, not all of them.  There were some “traditional” candy-loving, video-game playing chess club attending geeks.  But the point remains, childhood obesity isn’t primarily due to what kids DO it’s about the FOOD children have access to, particularly in poor communities.  And that is a very worthy political issue.

Benito talks about how everything he learned in law school was either useless or a lie.  One of my greatest fears was discovering any similarities between medical school and law school.  The human body is the human body and science is science, I assured myself.  Law is just crap made up by old people to protect their property.  Sadly, I must admit that nutrition is one area where medical school takes on a sort of law school-esque motif.  First, doctors are not nutritionists and the entire industry is not based on prevention.  Second the food pyramid is bullshit.  People don’t need meat.  People don’t need dairy.

The Obamas learned something, alot of things from the Clintons.  I understand it would be political suicide now, but perhaps if the Obamas are as active as the Clintons are in their post-whitehouse days perhaps they’ll take a play from the Clinton playbook and go vegan.

Clarence Thomas is only the second African-American ever to sit on the Supreme Court.  He was nominated by the first President Bush when Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American ever to sit on the Supreme Court, retired.  I do not care for Clarence Thomas.  Neither do 98% of African-Americans – ever since he first caught Reagan’s eye for being willing to perpetuate lies about African-Americans and his systematic destruction of the EEOC.  Twenty years later, he sits alienated and alone on the court, under a self-imposed vow of silence.  After his wife accepted over $700,000 to lobby against President Obama’s groundbreaking Healthcare reform, Thomas stands poised to cast the deciding vote rendering a law unconstitutional, purely on political grounds, that will directly cause the death of hundreds of thousands of the poorest Americans.  Ladies and gentleman I give you Clarence Thomas, the first Student Debtor.

Clarence Thomas has all the symptoms.  Self-loathing, shame, a feeling that he should be making a heck of alot more than he should, a HUGE wealth gap between himself and alumnus who were better off going in financially AND FINALLY a deep-seated hatred for his alma mater.  I witnessed his rage once, as a child.  I made the mistake of asking him what it was like to follow in the footsteps of Thurgood Marshall.  It was an innocent enough question.  I did not know at the time he was specifically nominated to destroy that great legacy.  I had never seen hate like that in the eyes of a black man, I thought only KKK and cops were capable of that.

I do not know if Clarence Thomas had to borrow money to attend Yale Law School.  I do know he was dirt poor.  I do know that when he graduated he couldn’t get any of the jobs he thought he was entitled to, and thus began a rather undistinguished career in the government.  I’m sure Thomas didn’t intend to sit on the bench long.  After being a federal judge he would be guaranteed a corner office at a white shoe firm where his only job would be to drum up business with clients whom he happened to rule in favor of during his tenure on the bench.

A lot of judges do this – greed is greed.  But with a student debtor there is something more, a sense you’ve been behind your whole life, and the older you get the worse the feeling gets.  Thomas was probably a year, two years tops, from leaving the bench before all the evil happened.  The nomination.  The accusation – painful, not because it wasn’t true (all evidence would suggest that it is) but because it came from a BLACK woman.  He could understand if he’d treated a white woman as such, but he didn’t.  He was black and on the brink of receiving one of the highest honors in the land.  Where was the support of the black community?

Twenty years later he can see the crowning achievement of the first black President about to fall in his lap.  Obama.  The black community universally approves of Obama.  Nay, they worship him.  No, not quite, but they do love him.  And they will love him forever.  Just as Thomas will always be hated and scorned.

Often a talented student does the following analysis when picking a school: although it is not impossible to go to a lesser school and be successful, it is “more difficult” to do so from that lower starting point.  Thomas no doubt made this decision.  It would be “easier” or “more likely” that he would be successful going to a Yale Law as opposed to a Howard, Thurgood Marshall’s alma mater.  Makes sense…but that’s only because everything I’ve told you about Thomas, and the student debtor generally, doesn’t show up on paper.

Thomas and Justice Marshall were different in just about every way.  Justice Marshall almost universally had clerks from the Ivy League.  Including Justice Kagan.  Thomas on the other hand prefers clerks from non-Ivy league law schools.  Perhaps the grass is always greener.  Perhaps there is something deeper going on.

When your life is in shambles and the road from ruin is uphill and rocky there is a tendency for our brethren to convince themselves that the flatter road with smoother terrain also (might) lead to a safe place.  In other words, once we discover the real villain, we often decide this person is too powerful so we instead decide to pick on the gimpy blind kid who was just minding his own business.  It happens. We’re not perfect. However, sometimes we see two knights in battle, one for us and one against us, and we side with the one against us…not because we are frustrated with our own knight’s performance (which is what we claim) but because we can hurt our own knight more and we yearn to matter, or at least feel like we do. Now THIS is dangerous.

It is becoming somewhat chic for debtors, hipsters and young people to criticize Obama, essentially for not being the biblical messiah.  They use this criticism to justify their lack of participation in the political process and when criticized are quick to tell you how many doors they knocked on in 2008 and what Obama owes them, etc, etc.

Well that was 2008.  Where were you during the route of 2010? Where were you in 2009 when the public option was on the line? How many doors did you knock on then? Did you knock on doors before or after Obama won the primary? Were you there for Kerry during the swift boat smearing? Did you protest the invasion of Iraq? Bush v. Gore?

No, you didn’t. You just wanted a story to tell your grandkids. Well here’s news for you, regardless of what you did THEN your grandkids will be more impressed if you can have an intelligent dialogue about what’s going on NOW (the future now) and have made a positive contribution towards it.

As lifelong academics we are conditioned to achieve through short bursts of effort like those required to ace tests or write papers. We don’t do the multiple round fights. We don’t even like to be hit. Well we are going to have to change that. There’s no glory in knocking out the gimpy blind kid and there is shame in betraying a guardian protector when he is crossing swords on your behalf.

I decided to do a little mentoring in honor of Black History Month so I went back to my undergrad Alma mater and sat on one of those panels for one of those events only uncool freshman and officers in the Black Student Alliance go to. Not surprisingly I was not the only doctor there. One of my colleagues, when asked what was the difference between the kids who got through (med school) and those that didn’t, replied “we’re all donkeys following a carrot on a stick. The ones that make it never stop and eat the grass all around them.” When asked to elaborate he said “we’re also not the ones who starve to death.”

It was the only insightful poignant thing said in a discussion that revolved around numbers and the giant elephant in the room- which of course was how to address the plethora of concealed discriminatory tactics meant to keep blacks away from math and science and pursuing careers in this necessary field.

Therein of course lies the dilemma of the black student. For the white student, after you’ve followed the carrot for a reasonable length of time hell, eat some grass. You only live once. The black student has no such luxury. Why? Because we remember our forefathers who DID NOT get to live once, and to honor their legacy we will follow the carrot until we collapse so long as we don’t see Jim Crow’s son on our backs with the pole and string.

It’s hard to decide whether to confront the younger generation with the truth. They should have the benefit of the knowledge earned with the broken lives of our greatest minds but knowing the truth comes at a price and that price is madness.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t think about these things on a daily basis.  I can’t.  No, I am not saying one can’t, I am saying I personally can’t do it.  I get up, I go to the hospital and I have one thing on my mind: learning the medicine and the politics to get where I need to be in my medical career.  I deal with racism, and to a lesser extent sexism, on a daily basis but I don’t try and make changes for everyone, I try and find exceptions for me personally, and when I’m done, I go home to my white boyfriend with REAL as opposed to the Mike Triforce (aka imagined) abs and let him take care of me.

But once a year, usually in February, I try and confront the madness…the madness that in the very process of simply looking for exceptions for myself as opposed to trying to change things at the expense of my own career is the very thing that this 400 year-old evil machine wants me to do and the very thing that makes me unworthy of the legacy of my forefathers even though the generation before mine loves to stand next to me in a cap and gown…once, twice, thrice, then with a white coat…all around while people just like me suffer from ailments so severe as to make any bodily harm trivial.

Shifting gears a little bit, it’s also mind boggling for me when I contemplate how alone I really am.  I couldn’t say any of this at the mentorship program.  All the mentorship program is designed to do is help the machine keep tabs on all of us…to keep us all in once place.  And what do we get in exchange? I get a weak salve for my conscious and some pre-med kid already well over 100k in debt gets a few names he can call in the hopes that one of them can sssssstretch one of those exceptions into a double exception, perhaps if there has been a race scandal recently.

Sigh.  Phase 2 of the Racial Calendar.  It begins with the Doctor King Holiday, goes to Black History Month, is almost always followed in March by a racial scandal on a college campus…until we are all save d by warmer weather and March Madness.