This story should be known to all brown people just to make it clear “where we stand” in these United States, The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired.Ten doses of the Covid-19 vaccine would expire within hours, so a Houston doctor gave it to people with medical conditions, including his wife. What followed was “the lowest moment in my life,” Dr. Hasan Gokal said:
The officials maintained that he had violated protocol and should have returned the remaining doses to the office or thrown them away, the doctor recalled. He also said that one of the officials startled him by questioning the lack of “equity” among those he had vaccinated.
“Are you suggesting that there were too many Indian names in that group?” Dr. Gokal said he asked.
Exactly, he said he was told.
…
On Jan. 21, about two weeks after the doctor’s termination, a friend called to say that a local reporter had just tweeted about him. At that very moment, one of his three children answered the door to bright lights and a thrust microphone. Shaken, the 16-year-old boy closed the door and said, “Dad, there are people out there with cameras.”
This was how Dr. Gokal learned that he had been charged with stealing vaccine doses.
Harris County’s district attorney, Kim Ogg, had just issued a news release that afternoon with the headline: “Fired Harris County Health Doctor Charged With Stealing Vial Of Covid-19 Vaccine.”
There is a lot of debate and argument on this weblog about Pakistan and India and the like. That’s because more than half the traffic on this site now comes from India. But this began as a Diasporic weblog, and in the Diaspora, especially in the USA, the gap between Pakistanis and Indians is much smaller. Dr. Gokal is viewed as “Indian.”
The second issue I think one might note is that these lawyers, with a passion for racial justice, ended up pinning something that was pretty invidious on this doctor driven by the moral panics of the era. As a conservative brown-skinned person I am on the receiving end of a lot of insults from woke white people. Many of my white friends, who observe the nature and the persistence of the insults, suspect that some of the attacks are probably driven by sublimated racial animus.
Where are we as “Asian Americans” in this country? The ruling elite of this country thinks we have “bad personalities“, all the better to exclude us from their institutions of power. There has long been a pattern of what are obviously “hate” crimes (mostly for fun and kicks, to be frank) against Asian Americans, in particular older ones, in urban areas. The perpetrators of these crimes are usually not white, and so the media and the cultural elite have not focused much energy on them. And now they are trying to blame COVID-19 and the Trump administration.
To brown Americans: we are not victims. Never forget. But, we are also outsiders. Never forget.
“The ruling elite of this country thinks we have “bad personalities”
The rich white progressive elites present themselves as anti-racist, but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It’s a club that they wield against the white working class who they see as their real enemies.
I’ve only really encountered genuine egalitarianism with working class whites. They’ll say stupid things out of ignorance, excessive frankness or misplaced humor, but they’re usually without guile.
// It’s a club that they wield against the white working class who they see as their real enemies//
Pretty much this. Throwing scraps to a few select minority groups is far cheaper than being accountable to the vast downwardly-mobile white middle classes. Even better, delegitimize their entitlements by framing them as oppressors of the former. Its poetry
Not sure if Indians are being excluded from power. If anything Indians are overrepresented compared to other racial/ethnic groups in American politics. Same thing in Canada and the UK. Surprisingly don’t think there are any major Indian politicians in Australia and New Zealand though.
“If anything Indians are overrepresented compared to other racial/ethnic groups in American politics.”
Numerically, yes. But Indian-Americans seem under-represented controlling for people with credentials/qualifications.
I remember seeing a study posted on this weblog a few months ago that showed that Indians generally faced some sort of ‘negative discrimination’ compared to other ethnicities including Chinese when making it to company boards and higher executive positions but made up for it through sheer numbers. Will try to find it. If someone else remembers it, feel free to post.
Prats, indian-americans know exactly how to chase credentials, not sure if that’s the same as being more qualified for public office. Back when our population was much smaller, our share of the ivy league student bodies was equivalent to what we see now. Despite this, I think we are over-achievers, and indian parents view that as a compliment, when it is an insult. It means you have hustled your way higher than your natural abilities (by SAT coaching, studying too obsessively, ect). Hate to say this but, i believe there is truth to this. The smartest peers I knew in college were often white people who had lower SAT scores but had never seen a practice test. 20 years later, many of these people have done doctorates in pure math and other abstract subjects, run defense research labs ,or powered through rigorous law programs. They peaked later. Also the american “meritocracy” is recruiting disproportionately from elite universities, where talented non-asians are underrepresented. There’s a whole layer of american talent that is being ignored because they never realized that 15 universities would be gatekeepers to opportunity in the way they are.
Yes, this vibes with my experience too. There are many Americans I know who did not excel in high school and even college, but are leaders in their area of work today. That being said, American kids do have a lot more exposure to opportunities than Asian kids. Even in high school, some of these folks were interning in national labs etc. Also, they are being parented by people who have a multi-generation experience of operating in a modern economy, so they know what matters to succeed as a professional etc. Its very different from what one has to do to get good grades.
Literally no one in Australia and NZ, except for a few MPs.
The most high profile in Australia is 1/2 Indian: Dev Sharma
prats, the bamboo ceiling tends to effect east asians. not south
anyway, indians do OK. BUT, they do it through assimilation into the white power structure. which is fine
just need to remember who is sahib…
In all fairness, you need to read the rest of the article:
“Days later, a criminal court judge, Franklin Bynum, dismissed the case for lack of probable cause.
“In the number of words usually taken to describe an allegation of retail shoplifting, the State attempts, for the first time, to criminalize a doctor’s documented administration of vaccine doses during a public health emergency,” he wrote. “The Court emphatically rejects this attempted imposition of the criminal law on the professional decisions of a physician.”
“Both the Texas Medical Association and the Harris County Medical Society recently issued a statement of support for physicians like Dr. Gokal who find themselves scrambling “to avoid wasting the vaccine in a punctured vial.”
“It is difficult to understand any justification for charging any well-intentioned physician in this situation with a criminal offense,” the statement said.
The DA, who must be a true [bad word] has said she will present the matter to a Grand Jury. We can safely assume that if the DA can talk the Grand Jury into issuing an indictment, the Judge will throw the case out again.
https://twitter.com/FriedrichPieter/status/1359938717977178117
“President Biden should rescind Sri Preston Kulkarni’s appointment considering both how it will harm
@Americorps
‘ image (especially in the eyes of many South Asian Americans) as well as the message it sends of tolerance for the #RSS & its fascist agenda.”
Welcome to the future of diversity. Harris County (mostly Houston) is majority-minority. However, each group is out for its own interests, which means conquering you. For now, the alliance seems to be against Whites, but that changes when other brown groups — notably Hispanics (Mongolians) — wish to conquer you too.