Welcome to the nonprofits where today we're going to talk about Joel Webbin and his idea on picking a doctor. Now, imagine walking into a hospital and Joel Webbin is there to help you choose your doctor based on their skin color. Because, in Joel Webbin's enlightened view, years of medical school, countless hours of training, and actual competence don't matter nearly as much as a melanin count. Joe presumes that if a doctor is a minority, he had a special pass through
a diversity initiative. Never mind that these same doctors may have outperformed their peers. In Webin's world, their race automatically makes them less qualified. It's almost as if he believes that complex surgeries and life saving treatments are better left to skin tone than skill. What's next, Joel, choosing your heart surgeon based on zodiac signs, Because that's about as logical as your line of thinking. Now, this story is from the Angry White Men by Eyes on the Right
on August twenty third, twenty twenty four. Now I should probably start off that, considering my history, I'm probably have the least right of anyone on this panel to point a finger at someone from being racist when you look at my past. But I've got to admit the idea of someone who must have gotten a free past because through medical school because they're a minority does seem rather
ludicrous to me. But Aaron, now, I know the diversity programs have come under attack and some white people are in an uproar over their misconception that someone is getting an advantage and they're missing out on it. But speaking out of missing out on things, what are they missing in this situation?
Well, if we kind of if we assume, let's assume a second, that they're not being racist, Okay, at least on purpose. Let's assume that they really have genuine concerns that minority students are being given slots that they don't
that they don't deserve quote unquote unquote affirmative essentially affirmative action. Right, you look at admissions to colleges, going to see is like, uh, why students are favored more than other students, that minorities are not getting uh into school in at the rates you would expect to see, and that affirmative action is supposed to supposed to fix that. In this article, he keeps saying that they get that these docters get free passes. There's no I think what they're missing is there's no
free pass. Just because you were a beneficiary of affirmative action doesn't mean that you didn't have to study, you didn't have to work hard, you still didn't have to have a good GPA, you still didn't have to have good test scores. It doesn't mean they just said, well, here's this, here's the student that got straight f's because of a firm of action, we're gonna let them into
medical school. And I think that's what they're missing, is that even though the admissions process is may not be may may might be as objective as we want it to be, it is still uh the people that are getting admitted are still qualified to be where they are and are still qualified to get into the school.
In my opinion, I think you're you're right there. I think that it's really an oversimplification of things. Yeah, and you know, and I think that they're overlooking a lot when they say that, because it's not like you get to get out of jail free card, and every time you fail the test, you're like, oh, you know, I got my free pass, so go ahead and give me an a and let me get through this exactly.
That's that's not what that is not what's happening.
That's not that is no, not at all now, aj You know, earlier we talked about someone who wanted the redefined faith out of Christianity. Now, is this a case of someone wanting to redefine racism out of their discriminate tour behavior? What do you think?
Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. You know, his wife was giving him some options, you know, while looking for a cardiologists, because he said he hasn't heard issus. And his comment to her was, well, when was a young white dude, and when was a young black dude? And I say that I prefer the young white dude because if they it's a chance that one of them was not qualified and was given a free pass, it would be a black guy. That is exactly what he said.
But don't worry because he's not racist, because he said that he would choose an Asian doctor over a black one. So yeah, that gives him a free pass.
Well, you know, at least he didn't say, well, you know, some of our best friends are black. You know, that's that's usually what we hear after something like that. But Damian switching over to you, you know, and one thing that I want to say off the top is I understand it's important to have a doctor that you're comfortable with. You know, I know that for me, race doesn't play
into what I find is important. But I have criteria too, So how often do you think race is the thing that plays into decisions when when people are choosing a doctor or someone like this.
Well, I'm glad you are glad you ass that because in my part of Australia, I live in a very very multicultural city where you can, like, if you name a nationality, you know, if you look far enough, you'll probably find a doctor of that nationality. And in my part of my city there are a lot of Indian and Asian and African doctors because in my part of the world there are lots of African and Asian and
you know, Indian Indian people. So I don't think it's a crime to want to be treated by a practitioner that you feel culturally comfortable with. I think I think the bigger I think maybe it does become somewhat offensive is if you disparage the abilities of these doctors simply because of because of their culture. You know, if if if an Indian, if an Indian doctor who doesn't speak English, that well, you know, if you're disparaged like that, that
that guy could like really know his stuff. But just because he doesn't speak English fluently, you know, it can lead to a perception that he doesn't know what he doesn't know what he's doing. But yeah, I think that's where and so I do want to say that weapons reasoning is not completely without merit, because we do know that people of certain races are given advantages not afforded
to people of other races. However, however, does that mean that a black doctor hasn't passed all their tests and hasn't got gone through all the training, because it would essentially be medical negligence if a certifying board gave a black person a pass that they wouldn't give to a white person and then that underqualified black person went out and made a mistake of some sort. So I think, you know, in terms of entry to the courses, maybe
there is some sort of affirmative action. But my hope is that the certifying boards all get treat to everyone equally. And so I think That's probably where where webon kind of does fall over a bit, is that, you know, Okay, people get into these high level classes maybe with some affirmative action, but do they qualify with affirmative action as well. I'm not sure that they. I'm not sure that they do, and I think it would be a case of medical negligence if they did.
I think that there could be like schools that look for students with diversity, like you know, to fill up those those quarters that they may have, But I don't think that is necessarily the case when when they're graduating from medical school, like you said, when they're going to certify it, and then you need to have a specific standard that you meet and you know, and then make it. It's I'm a Hispanic and I speak Spanish, So if I pick the doctor because they speak Spanish, then you know,
that's fine. But if I went and said, well, I'm not going to pick a doctor because he's black and maybe you've got a free pass, I will say that would definitely be considered racist.
Okay, so I say that. So let's say that you go to a doctor, to a clinic and there is a white doctor who's you know, let's let's say it's Billy Bob, who who's a redneck? And you have who is who's Spanish? Who would you be more comfortable with.
Well, at this point, I actually speak English better than Spanish, so I would quet somebody that I can communicate better with. Yeah, so I can see like his you know what, he's what you were saying earlier about choosing somebody that that you could fit with, right.
But especially especially if you're going to evolve personal medical details, and that may involve talking about your genitalia or some some very personal part of your of your of your body, you know, if you don't feel comfortable talking about that thing. And one of the factors is, you know, it is race and culture, and.
In that sense, you're going to be seen as sexist if you if I chose a woman or if you chose a man, you can be you know, sexist. But truly it's just what you feel more comfortable with. I don't think in the case of women, it was it was that comfortable level of somebody that he felt comfortable with in a matter of culture. For him, it was more like, well, this person probably got a free.
Pass, you know. I do think that from taking me personally. One of the things that I like about a doctor, and that decides whether I go back to them, is do I feel comfortable that they're being straightforward. My general practitioner, the only time I hear anybody in his office speaking English is when they're talking to me or my wife,
because almost all his patients are Spanish. But I appreciate his honesty because for the last three years, the first two years, every time I saw him, my doctor said, you're mister Carroll, You're You're going to die from this. This is going to kill you. And he was always important to remind me of that because he wanted me
to make sure I took it serious. I had no objection to that because I appreciated that straightforward nature, just as with my gi he told me he and I talked about because I'm big on right to death with dignity. He said, yeah, I ever died, I'm going to go to California, where I can go whatever drugs I need, and I can pitch a tent wherever I want to, and I can take a shit in the street, and I can go ahead and die and comfort. So I
appreciate them. He's of India by the way, and I appreciate them because we have a straightforward relationship, and I get that if that's about race or a woman or a man, I think people should have the right to make that choice. But it still doesn't change the fact that if you're doing it solely based on the color of their skin, are certain aspects you're probably being racist about it. But I would like to go ahead and switch to.
AJ.
Do you think that a firm one of the things is that, Well, actually, you know what, let me ask you this first. The interviews interview are seeing them imply that perhaps slavery was not a sin, or at least that's how I took it. How did you come away from that topic? Is he to the point where his justification of these actions also, uh doesn't the Bible? Does the Bible condemn slavery? Or is he right there? Well?
Eric con was actually the person interviewing during the interview here, and he came to Joggle's rescue by offering his insight. He said, have we even defined the sin? Clearly? I think you guys have shown that we haven't. But if we haven't defined the sin as a biblical sin, why is it to the level of is it really like that penalty sin? You a chulter's view to do or say anything that's racist, and we have to ask how
we got to that place. That was his question. He's basically saying that racism should not be considered a sin because it's not considered a sin in the Bible. So with Eric's reasoning, we basically should be able to bring back slavery too, because it isn't a biblical sin, and apparently anything that isn't a biblical sin should be allowed even in our modern culture. So we can give Joel a free pass, as the children's song says, because the Bible tells me.
So.
Yeah, you know, I found that very disturbing. More disturbing than Joel choosing a doctor out of a photograph because it was lighter than the guy and the other photograph. It is the fact that this, since it's not it's
not really a sin, everything should be okay. You know, I know I've seen the meme, and I once again, I hate to break your life down to a meme where it says, you know, let's play a game, you know, let's open our Bible and pick a sin, and we'll all go out and do what the Bible says to not do, I mean to do and don't sin, but do what the Bible says to do, and let's see who gets arrested first. So yeah, that seems like a pretty bad advice, a pretty bad suggestion. So Aaron, I
wanted to switch over to you for a moment. What do you think what do you see as methods to try to counter because there is a reality that there is systemic discrimination in our society and has been for a long time time. What do you think some of those methods we could use to counter that.
As far as getting to schools, I'm not quite sure how you do that. It's a really tough problem because a lot of a colle of admissions now well they used to Becket when I was applying to college, you had to take a standardized test, the SAT or the ACT. Just you know that. That's to get into undergraduate and then to believe to get into medical school and other schools. There are other tests to become a lawyer, become a doctor that you have to take, and those are the
most objective tests measures we have. But people get into school. But unfortunately tests aren't one hundred percent reliable. Some people test really well, some people don't. Some people are really smart and are awful at tests, and vice versa, you know. And so there's more to admission college admissions than just
test scores or even GPAs. Maybe you were on tracking at a four poto GPA and your junior year in high school you got mono right, and you couldn't do work for a whole semester and got a bunch of c's, But then the rest of your high school you got you go, you were straight a's, right. So there's there's more life than just these than just these objective measures. I don't know what the right solution is, because if you just go to subjective measures, then you've got problems
where people look at names. They've got maybe some race suspense that they don't know about, some unknown biases, and they see names from certain races and like, oh, let's not admit them, but let's let's stick to the white names, so to speak, you know, And that's that's up to college admissions people to figure out and solve. I think that one of my favorite stories about overcoming this this kind of prejudice that that gets built in are comes
from the world of symphonies. You know, for a long time, symphonies were predominantly white and male. And at some point, I don't know how long ago, and this I think it's been in this past fifty hundred years, people realize, hey, we need to solve this problem because there are a lot of good musicians that aren't white and that aren't male. What do I do about it? Well, what they did
was they made people audition blind blindly. So if you were an auditioned for a symphony, were you auditioned behind curtain so nobody can see what sex you were, what race you were, what gender you were. All they could judge you on was the quality of your music. And that solved the inclusivity problem in symphonies. And it's really clever solutions like that that I think need to be put
in place for college admissions. I don't know what they are, that's not my field, but something akin to the to what symphonies do I think would be would be amazing.
That's what Infidel just said. You know, he looked at a photo of a black guy and a white guy and he said, I'm going to go with the white guy just because he's white. He didn't look at what school he graduated from. He didn't look at this specific you know, specialty in cardiology that he was looking for, like say, if you go with a congenital health disorder or what an acquire how diseased, then you're going to go to a different type of cardiologist, like he just chose based on skin color.
Actually, I think the most disturbing like this hasn't been brought up. I'm surprised this hasn't been brought up. But I think the most disturbing part of this whole story is that why hasn't he about it? Why is he going to a cardiologist for treatment rather than just fasting and praying to the Lord to God to heal him not doing that?
I think at this point it's timeing to say the ACA does not support thoughts and prayers over going to your local doctors. Now, on a more serious note, do you think, Damien, do you think that affirmative action programs like this? Do you do you think that Joel has a point and do you think that they do cause or allow people who are less competent to become doctors or do you think that he's just perhaps trying to cover his own view his own.
I'm a little bit both ways on it. Like I don't have a problem with ethnic minorities being given having opportunities open up to them, particularly if they are talented or smart or whatever. Like if if a person who is intelligent and switched on is denied an opportunity simply because of their race, I think that's that's that's a
great injustice as well. I'm also I'm also however, I also think these kind of things should be meritocracies, where you know, we are literally dealing with people's lives here, and so yeah, like I suppose my hope is that the race of the person doesn't matter. It's their training and their dedication to professionalism that does. And so yeah, it's like I hope that a black person doesn't get into a course simply because they're black. That will be
that will be a bad outcome. I want a black person to get into a cardioli to be a cardiologist because that's where their passion is and that they've earned the right to be a professional cardiologist.
You know, I talk to you guys previously about my history and my past. I work for a in the night early late eighties, early nineties, I worked for a very openly racist ex clan member in Louisiana for about three years, and what strikes me odd though, is that I'm seeing more and more things that we knew better to say than then. We knew not to say these things, and now we seem to have people saying things like
this with no sense of self awareness. Turning to you, AJ, do you think that this is the result of the normalization of the divisive rhetoric that we've seen in the last four or five years when it comes to race, when it comes to women, when it comes to the LGBTQ plus community, and of course particularly trans people. Have we got to the point where there's a certain level of what I would view as shamelessness. That's the new normal, you know.
I think that the more we talk about these issues, and the more we bring up awareness of transspeople, of gay people, of even people of color, then we will see better acceptance. But there is such a big pushback from this. I don't want to call it in traditions because I don't think it said tradition. It's more of a yeah, like I said, normalizing being racist, and because you know, we come from like hundreds of years of slavery, So it hasn't been that long that we have abolished slavery.
So I would say I hope that it's not expected to continue, but I will say that I am not surprised that it is still here.
Yeah, I wish I could be surprised, but you know, I'm not. Now. Aaron part of me feels like that Joel did the black doctor a favor by not choosing him as a doctor, by not being his patient patient, what do you think?
I think I kind of agree with Damide, like if you're not if you're not comfortable with a doctor because of the race, then yeah, you're probably doing yourself a service and that doctor service by not being their patient. I think this person just needs to think about why they hold this opinion that they're that they hold. Why
do they think this doctor got a free pass? Like the words that he's using, the way he's describing things isn't I don't think the way the world works, and so he's he's got kind of a skewed worldview, and I think that's what he needs to really think about and understand why he thinks that black doctors get free passes, because I think that's the underlying racist message is not when you think about its like, well, why do you
think black doctors get free passes? Well, that must mean you think black doctors are incompetent just because they're black. And that's that's the racist part that we're talking about here. It's it's not he's not choosing this doctor because he's more comfortable with a black doctor or culturally, or that he thinks that's a better fit. He thinks that their doctor is somehow just not as capable of being a doctor.
Yeah, and I agree because and he mentioned that if it was a black doctor that he knew that was in his church, he might choose them. And so while that implies a certain level of comfort, it also says is that, well, if I know the guy and you know he's one of the exceptions, is almost what that sounds like. And that's a whole other issue, because then once again you're you're you're labeling everyone with a broad brush.
I know we're going to wrap up here shortly, but one thing I was wondering is do you think this event actually happened or just some fabrication to allow Joel the chance to cater to a certain groups of existing bigotry, some sort of reverse virtue signaling call for racist.
That's a really good question. I mean I hadn't thought about that, but you know, given today's culture and like I said, how normal it is for a lot of people to be racist, I will not really doubt that this actually happened.
Damien Aaron. I'm going to give you both anything to wrap up anything you wanted to comment on. Damien, I'll I don't get first.
I don't have anything off the top of my head. No, sorry, okay, we don't want to talk to you, then, okay, I just have something. I do have something to say. So I think so a baseline for understanding if you're succeeding at not being prejudiced when it comes to college admissions is to compare your student population that you're admitting to the population of from which you're selecting students. Right, so,
twelve percent of the United States is black. That means you would expect twelve percent of your incoming freshmen to be black. And if it's lower than that, then you probably have a discrimination problem. If it's a right around that,
you probably don't. And I think what affirmative action really is trying to was really trying to get to, is there are systemic problems in our country that make it harder for minorities and women to have the opportunities that white men have, and affirmative action is attempting to solve that problem. And I have no problem in solving if we were just to take race out of it, what are we trying to solve? We want, we want disadvantaged
people to have opportunities. So let's solve that problem. Let's make get disadvantaged people into higher education and into school, because there are a lot of people that don't just don't have the means to go to become doctors, and they really want to. They probably make great doctors. Let's look, let's try and find disadvantaged people and get them into higher education.
I think you make a very valid point. I think that sometimes we forget that there really are and I know this goes against those people who ran about woke people, but there really are built in discrimination into the system. And I don't you know, I remember one time you
mentioned the Shirley cards. I believe that was what it was for Kodak, and you know it wasn'n intent to be race discriminatory, but you know, black people got shitty pictures because the gold standard was this white, fair, complexed woman that calibrated everything by So I think that this is one way to potentially do that. And Damien, did you have anything you wanted to say?
No, As I said, my hope is that a person who has the passion and the capacity for a potentially life saving position, I hope that they get the position and get to live out their passion, regardless of race.
Couldn't say I better now, you know, And maybe right now I'm preaching and reflecting them myself a little bit here, But I do feel like it's important for people to be able to hear themselves.
You know.
I think that until you can hear just how bad what you're saying sounds, you're not going to change. And I feel like we've gotten to a point where some of the most vile and hateful things that we hear on a regular basis from our politicians are the religious leaders and a variety of other people. I think sometimes we lose the ability to hear just how shitty what
we're saying actually is. You know, I think that it's important and instead of a steady doctrine of intolerance that makes it easier for us to remain oblivious and double down on hate, that we didn't need to challenge ourselves to be better, because I just think that that is a very shallow way to choose a doctor.