Today’s Washington Post publishes the following letter from one Ronald S. Brown, identified as an associate professor of Dentistry at Howard University:
Minority populations are underserved with respect to dental care in large part because of the small numbers of African American, Hispanic and Native American dentists. Less than 3 percent of U.S. dentists are African American. African Americans accounted for only 3.3 percent of dentists graduating from U.S. dental schools in 2002.
With affirmative action programs in place, the percentage of African American graduating dentists increased from 2.8 percent in 1973 to 5.38 percent in 1996. Further, approximately half of those dentists were produced by two of 54 dental colleges in the United States: Howard University College of Dentistry and Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry, both historically black colleges.
The decline of affirmative action programs within dental education appears destined to continue de facto racial segregation within dental education and reduced dental care for underserved minority populations.
Let’s examine the teeth of this revealing argument:
- Are white and Asian dentists refusing service to minority patients?
- Is there any evidence that black patients who go to black dentists would refuse to see a non-black dentist if a black dentist weren’t available?
- Certainly Howard and Meharry have not reduced their acceptance of black dental students. Where have such reductions been the result of a “decline of affirmative action” since 1996? All from state schools in California and Texas and Florida?
- Should we assume that what is claimed to be half the nation’s black dentists received an inferior education because of a lack of “diversity” in their dental schools?
- Prof. Brown claims that the concentration of black dental students at Howard and Meharry amounts to “de facto racial segregation.” According to many prevalent theories, de facto segregation is illegal. Does Prof. Brown suggest that black dental students at Howard and Meharry should be bused (figuratively, of course) to other dental schools?
- If the nation must have more black dentists, and if most dental schools are suffering an academically crippling lack of diversity, should we introduce a black dental draft and conscript black students to attend dental school? True, such a policy would interfere to a certain degree with the old-fashioned notion of individual freedom of choice, but we seem willing enough now to sacrifice individual rights to racial balance in other areas. Why not in dentistry?
Never forget that the guy who got into medical school instead of Bakke was allegedly going to “serve the community”–instead he did lipsuctions and plastic surgery and maimed his patients before he died. If Afrian Americans can’t face a Chinese-American dentist, let ’em get dentures.
I’ve never heard that before. Where can I find out more?
His name was Patrick Chavis, and here’s Michelle Malkin’s column about him,. She is a conservative writer. BGut the NYTimes peice about him didn’t really do into the medical malpractice stuff. http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:qOeHD-VdptgC:www.washtimes.com/commentary/20020809-71590041.htm+%22Patrick+Chavis%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
you’re going about all this backwards. the question should be is every community being served?
the entire point of segregation was to take black americans out of the mainstream. it was so effective that the south african nationalists build apartheid based on the model of jim crow.
so if the old jim crow neighborhoods are still not receiving mainstream medical care, then the problem remains.
don’t go dancing around the pinhead of medical admissions if you are not interested in fixing the health care problem.
what we are faced with in dentistry (if the facts show it) as well as any number of goods and services is the failure of free markets to solve the problem of jim crow.
this is yet another example of bullheaded intransigence masquerading as integrity on race. the civil rights movement was not about colorblindness as a principle, it was about delivering the goods and services of the mightiest nation on the planet to those it had systematically denied for generations.
Cobb – Your comment provides a good basis for discussing where and how we disagree. In my view the civil rights movement was in fact about ending racial discrimination. It succeeded legally, and progress continues to be made on succeeding in fact. The problem is that racial discrimination is not the beginning and end of all problems, and in my view the problems that remain are not primarily civil rights problems (except the newer forms of discrimination that have been introduced to deal with what ending discrimination did not fix). That is, it is certainly true that the free market has not succeeded in insuring that all Americans (let’s leave aside the “communities” for a moment, because that tends to introduce the idea of group rights) have adequate medical care. It is an enormous, unwarranted non sequiturial leap to conclude that the best way, or even a minimally acceptable way, to address that is by lowering standards for minority medical/dental school applicants. If medical services are not adequate, then programs must be developed to make sure they are. But these programs, like everything the government does, must be done in such a way as not to discriminate by race or national origin or religion. They should be directed to the medically needy of whatever race.
onlooker–Thanks for the reference. I checked it out and then did some Googling for “Patrick Chavis.”
It turns out that there were actually 5 blacks preferentially admitted to UC Davis med school who had grades and test scores significantly lower than those of the rejected (white) Baake.
So why all the publicity for Chavis? Well, for one thing “The University of California at Davis has no records of what the four blacks admitted with Dr. Chavis are doing” says the Chavis obituary in the NY Times. More important, in June, 1995, the New York Times Magazine ran a long cover story by Nicholas Lemann called “Whatever Happened to the Case for Affirmative Action?” Chavis was on the cover and was a large part of the story. Chavis was an ob-gyn in Compton, a poor, black area of LA. Baake, who had been admitted to UCD med school by court order, was an anaesthesiologist in Minnesota.
The next year, Proposition 209 was on the ballot in California. It would prohibit the state government from treating people differently on the basis of race (it passed that November). Many people (e.g., Ted Kennedy, Tom Hayden, the Nation) used Chavis as an argument against Prop. 209. Hadn’t he been a more productive doctor than Baake? Hadn’t he contributed more to American society than Baake? Hadn’t he been a better investment of public funds than Baake?
It certainly looked that way. But the reality was rather complex. Dr. Chavis was a prickly person who had had some professional difficulties and may not have been a very good doctor. In the 1990s he branched out into doing liposuction. He treated some patients extraordinarily badly (one of whom, Tammaria Cotton, died) and had his license suspended in 1997 and revoked in 1998.
William McGowan gives some of the history in the preface to his book “Coloring the News,” reprinted online at http://www.coloringthenews.com/html/preface.html
Chavis was shot to death on July 23, 2002.
A copy of the NY Times obituary can be found at http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/dmartin.html
Jeff Jacoby has an impassionned (and extreme?) conclusion to his August 14, 1997 column on Chavis and affirmative action:
By himself, Chavis isn’t an argument against racial preferences. Single examples do not constitute data. He is, however, a reminder of something Kennedy and the others can’t seem to grasp: Minority communities and poor families don’t need black doctors. They need good doctors. And when universities admit medical students on grounds other than academic ability, they will turn out fewer doctors who are good.
In its 1978 Bakke decision, the Supreme Court approved the system that put Patrick Chavis in medical school: lower academic standards for most black students in exchange for racial “diversity.” The result is that black students for 20 years have been failing the national medical boards — the leading measure of medical school achievement — far more often than their peers.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that while 88 percent of white students pass the exam, only 49 percent of black students do. The disparity is caused almost entirely by lower admissions standards: Minority students admitted without regard to race rarely fail.
The cost of medical affirmative action isn’t theoretical. It is paid in human suffering — sometimes in human lives. Maybe Kennedy and Hayden don’t understand how. Tammaria Cotton’s widower does.
http://www.bigeye.com/jj081202.htm
Does anyone know what happened to the other 4 students?
the cost of medical affirmative action would be borne in suffering if the medical boards and licenses were race normed. they are not. once you are board certified, malpractice and any other incompetence stands at the foot of the certifying authority. if not, why not blame chavis’ parents?
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john, i do not assert the converse, that affirmative action is the solution to inadequate medical care in ghettoes. i agree that the underserved communities, and i will continue to talk about communities so long as insurance companies do, need good doctors of any color. rather i think i am finding that the mantle of the civil rights movement is being misappropriated for the sake of a principle which is not being much violated and doesn’t truly address any scope of social inequity commensurate with the passion it generates.
i am constantly brought to mind that the attorney general is completely missing from this picture and that activists are (purposely?) not using the eeoc. are the colorblind activists suggesting that the eeoc is useless and that some constitutional adjudication is the only avenue of satisfactory recourse? or is there some fear that the standards of the eeoc might suggest that there is no statutory merit (i hope i’m using that phrase correctly) in these test cases?
i am thinking of blumrosen’s 1995 report.
http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/sf/faq021.htm
Cobb – As you know, I believe the mantle of the civil rights movement is being misappropriated, and sullied, every time any institution awards a preference based on race, and that practice is then defended by calling it civil rights and accusing people who oppose it of opposing civil rights.
I don’t have a good answer to your interesting question about the EEOC, but I suspect at least part of the answer may be that the EEOC is concerned with discrimination in employment, and so does not get involved in many hot button issues such as affirmative action in college admissions.
But are minorites supposed to go to doctors and dentists of their own color? Why not give rebates on tuition is graduate practice in underserved areas–no matter what color. Why are we supposed to pander to someone’s preference for a black dentist?
at some point we have to disentangle the various movements and forces concurrent with the civil rights movement understanding that those things african americans desire for themselves are not always borne on the backs of successful politics,
nor are successful politics always independent of african american support.
in other words there is a certain amount of intransigence which masks itself as the virtue of moderation. i believe most racist acts go unpunished, and the last time i asked most folks opposed ratcheting up the criminalization of racism. plenty folks are all too happy to scrap affirmative action as unconstitutional, but unwilling to punish hate crimes. they may seem divergent issues, but not from the perspective of the mainstream of african american politics.
I am a black psychiatrist in New York (Ivy league educated and trained, aided significantly by affirmative action programs). I found your website accidentally after searching for a black dentist in my area.
It is always fascinating to me the attempts made by groups like yours to dismiss the subtleties of racism and race relations in this country by employing such superficial rationalizations as the ones you propose and thinly disguised as questions. (Freud might say that perhaps you are simply defending against and assuaging your own guilt).
My point is this: I have attended predominantly white institutions, been trained by predominantly white faculty, and practice with predominantly white colleagues. This is all fine and good with me, but when it comes to choosing my own health care providers, I put in the extra effort to locate Black practitioners. I do this for many reasons that I don’t have the time or energy to state here, but the one I felt compelled to mention (and that your investigative questions unfortunately don’t take into account) is TRUST. Yes, even I, an upper middle class, assimilated, black professional have a nagging doubt about how well I would be cared for by a White physician. This is not only the unfortunate legacy of racism and healthcare in this country (for example, the notorious Tuskegee experiment-just to name one clear cut case with which you are likely familiar), but it is also the product of ongoing evidence, both anecdotal (recall that I’m a physician as well and have witnessed these much subtler forms of racism) and rigorous, scientific trials in many specialties of medicine which show that Blacks, even when controlling for confounding variables (class etc.) are treated differently (i.e. worse) than Whites. I will not list references here because I’m sure your investigative natures will be all the fuel you need to seek them out yourselves.
My rebuttal does not address all of your questions (nor was it an attempt to), and I have my own, dare I say more sophisticated concerns with affirmative action programs as they stand currently, but alas, I do have a toothache, and although I will have a White dentist attend to it if need be, for now, I need to continue my (all too difficult) search for a Black dentist!
Toya D. Clay, M.D.
i’m currently a dental student. in my class there are 3 blacks out of total class of 78. all three of them are going for free, while i’ll be in debt well over $250,000.
is there really a decline of aa programs in dentistry? it seems to be a there is a decline of qualified black applicants. as a matter of fact, the 3 in my class are not even american blacks. 2 are from the caribbean and one from africa.
i suspect my school would love to cherry pick black students from howard and meharry and give them all kinds of money. i suspect most don’t meet our criteria for admission.
Go ahead Dr. Clay, I couldn’t have said that better myself. I live in a black ghetto and I hardly see any black professionals, not to say that the profesionals that practice here are not good professionals but half of me wonders if they care. Yes we need good doctors but we also need doctors that understand our values and what we are concerned about. If I were going to see a doctor, especially a dentist I would want them understand why my teeth are bad, yeah it is from the soul food and I was not use to seeing a dentist and so on. It is such an important aspect of care that a doctor be good but also totally understand their patients. The doctors that I see do not understand me or my culture and therefore in my opinion they are worse then seeing a bad doctor.
Another important factor is many whites simply do not want to practice in ghettos and trust me those that do practice here act like they don’t care. Our doctors are that way, our dentist, and our teachers. So I understand your upset for AA programs it is unfair to you however what ideas do you have to bring more minorities that are professionals to our communities. For those that say we dont need black doctors in our communities tell me how we can get doctors to even want to work in our ghettos and truly understand our communties and our people. All I have heard are complants and I want to here some solutions. And like they say around here “If you ain’t got a solution, by all means sit down.”
Shante Brown