Classifieds

Commentary
Having worked briefly in South Africa at the height of apartheid, I’m surprised by the degree to which the mentality of apartheid seems to have infected the intelligentsia of the United States. The analogy is by no means exact, and there are significant differences between the two countries, of course, but the obsession with race as a politically important consideration in policy-making is increasingly similar.
Recently, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) carried an opinion piece justifying racial discrimination in the selection of medical students. It didn’t say so in as many words, but it argued that the academic standard required of what it called minoritized students should be lower than that of white students (and presumably South Asian and Chinese ones as well, the latter being the wrong kind of minority and not in need of positive discrimination)....