On Race, Privilege, and Medicine
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New Year, Fresh Take

1/1/2016

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In celebration of the new year, I've decided to cast aside the tradition of setting resolutions. It's boring. It's hard work. In most cases, it's just straight up lying. Instead, I've decided to celebrate the new year by looking at things in a new light - a perspective change. A way to rediscover the delights in our lives that we so commonly overlook and take for granted. In that spirit, a couple of top 3 lists!

Top 3 songs that were kinda lame but then
​became amazing after their music video

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​​The corollary to that:
​A song that got significantly worse after watching the video


Top 3 songs rejuvenated by Drag

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Ramadan Mubarak

8/19/2012

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Eid said! It's Eid, marking the end of Ramadan!  I can't help but feel a little nostalgic for Michigan.  Even though I'm not Muslim, it can be fun to be swept up in a community's special time.

I'm not Christian either, in fact, I don't even really celebrate Christmas commercially anymore like my family did when we were children, but I still love watching A Christmas Story on TBS. I'll even admit that I enjoy a good slice of fruitcake every once and awhile (I do have standards though... only high quality fruitcake and usually with rum).

Similarly, it was such a privilege to be living in an area with a high enough concentration of Muslims that I could get a contact high.  You're reminded to be thoughtful about one's behavior and thoughts.  You're inspired to come together as a Muslim community, a local community, and a global community.  You congregate around food.  These are all things that I support.

For those of us who are not Muslim, Ramadan's most notable aspect is usually the month long fast that occurs while the sun is in the sky. Though the fast is only one portion of a larger theme of abstinence and purity, it's definitely one of the first things that comes to mind for me when I think of Ramadan.  And medically, though I'm sure actively trying to reduce the number of negative thoughts in your mind can reduce stress and thus promote wellness, it's the fasting component of Ramadan that needs to be discussed with my patients who have Diabetes.


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the state of LGBT related medical education

9/9/2011

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JAMA published its annual medical education issue this week and there was an article on LGBT-related curriculum. I was asked to write a short blog response for Slate.  Check it out!
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A Miracle Requires an Unfavorable Prognosis

6/15/2011

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This blog and article are awesome.

An evidence-based approach to discussing terminal illness with patients and families that believe in miracles? Incredible. Check it out: Approaching Patients and Family Members Who Hope for a Miracle.

Turns out doctors and the rest of society have grossly different viewpoints on whether or not medical miracles exist (20.2% vs. 61.3%) but also how important a doctor's opinion of prognosis is. Only "2% of surrogate [decision makers base] their view of their loved one's prognosis solely on the physcians prognostic estimate." And this whole time we just thought it was that we didn't explain it right.
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The fine line of Privilege: Poverty Pimps

6/3/2011

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A short article that I thought was interesting and continues to explore the importance of work being more than just well-intentioned.
True Confessions: How I Became a Poverty Pimp
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Sexism: pp 1-1069

12/28/2010

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Recently one of my previous blogs was fortunate enough to be posted on both thiscantbehappening.net (progressive online news collective) and opednews.com.  I feel the need to share one of the hilarious anecdotes from the comments:

"NOTE: I remember getting a huge text book on Ob-Gyn from my sister in law the pediatritian when my wife got pregnant the first time. My wife was looking through the index, finding out about all these scary things that might happen to her fetus (none did, thankfully!), and she came to the index term "Sexism". The Index entry was "Sexism: prodigious quantities of, pp 1-1069." That was the number of pages in the book.

It was pretty funny when you think about it. The indexer must have been a woman, and whoever did this entry was making a good joke and also a political comment about a classic work edited by to men. We wondered how many editions the entry had made it through. But clearly the problem is real."
-Dave Lindorff, founder of thiscantbehappening.net
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StraightWhiteMon! I choose you!

9/30/2010

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I woke up this morning with my email abuzz with the most recent gossip politics. The assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan has turned into a Mean Girl - only he's not crafty and manipulative. The biggest tool in his arsenal is stealing pictures from Facebook and using Microsoft Paint to modify them. (I feel sorry for him; he's in a bind. As a government employee, he doesn't make enough money to afford Photoshop, but he's professionally bound not to bootleg it. Thus he's reduced to creating digital creations reminiscent of five year old art projects.)

But I'm not going to spend too much time pointing out how stupid or ridiculous he is. Even his boss says “his immaturity and lack of judgment... are clear.” And it's exactly this reason why I want to call out to all Allies that this the time to speak up.

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"Integration" Mapped

9/23/2010

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Hey all - referred to me from a friend. Just thought it was visually striking and quite interesting given the different histories of each city and how that's played out into the racial make up of their neighborhoods:
Infographics of the Day: How Segregated is Your City?

Highlights for Children:
In Mr. Eminem's semi-autobiographical movie he references dragging his "white ass" across 8-mile. Based on this map of racial distribution, where do you think 8-mile is?
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Detroit, MI
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Shiao Mei Mei and the Motherland

3/12/2010

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Hey all, in case you're curious, my little sister is currently back in Taiwan for the first time in her adult life.  She's writing a blog that captures the hilarity of the child-adult status that many of us have when we return to our country of ancestry.

Check out her latest post on finding language exchange partners which couldn't help but make me laugh:
http://emilyrobin.weebly.com/
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Q and A - part 1 - rewritten

12/5/2009

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The intersection of identities. To be honest, sometimes it's still hard for me to articulate exactly what that means. For as long as I've been thinking about identity, people have often casually referred to the concept that single identities within a person cannot be compartmentalized. Intuitively that seems to make sense; it's generally accepted that compartmentalizing different parts of yourself (even in terms broader than identities) is at its most innocuous, an active process, and at its most damaging, an alienating process.  However, if someone asked me to explain exactly what that meant I'm not sure what I would say.

Our identities shape our place in the world. Inevitably, they play a large role in influencing the sort of point of view and experiences that one has. I suppose at it's most basic, the point is that identities/experiences are not discretely cumulative.

I'm a math person at heart so I can't help but think about in those terms. So what would it mean if identities were discretely cumulative? If we assume a norm of experiences as humans, you might think, each identity then adds a certain amount of experience. So let's say this baseline experience is b. Being white might add specific points of view/experiences,W; being black, B; and being gay, G. Thus being a gay, white male might give you the life experience of b+W+G and being a gay, black male might give you the experience of b+B+G. This would imply that the only difference, on average, between a gay, white male and a gay, black male, is their difference in race. Their experiences being gay would be identical.

It's a simple way to look at the world and superficially maybe it makes sense. Don't all gay people, regardless of their other identities have something in common? Certainly. But it would be naïve to believe it could be compartmentalized. If that were true, it would mean that every interaction would be between only one part of yourself and one part of the person you were talking to. For example, when catching up with a friend, you could tell them about how it's been going parenting and how your relationship with your partner is going. However, you could never talk about how becoming a new parent has affected your relationship with your partner. Allowing that interplay would mean that a single parent and a partnered parent might have different experiences as parents. We would no longer have a concrete set of experiences for parenting.

In reality, things are far more complicated. Shared identities do often indicate a certain commonality, but it would be remiss to not recognize that a person's other identities' play a role in shaping how they see the world, how they interact with the world, and even how they relate to their own identities.

For example, I've often heard LGBT, white folks compare the LGBT civil rights movement to the Black civil rights movement. Far less often have I heard black, LGBT folks say so. Neither group is wrong. The LGBT rights movement is similar in the sense that its a marginalized community fighting for equal legal rights. Both groups have had members of their own community lose their lives due to bigotry. There are no stakes higher than life itself. On the other hand, without diminishing the plight of LGBT folks, it's true that it's also not quite the same. LGBT people were not systematically enslaved and treated as property by straight people.

The consequences of intersecting identities are not only personal, they ripple far beyond our own individual experiences. I think some of the most articulate examples of this come from black, feminist writers.  bell hooks writes in her essay, “The Integrity of Black Womanhood:”

“Assailed on the one hand by white patriarchy and on the other hand by sexist black men and racist white women, black women must be ever vigilant in our struggle to challenge and transform the devaluation of black womanhood. Those of us who advocate feminist politics must continually counter representations of our reality that depict us as race traitors. Throughout our history in the United States, patriarchal black nationalism has consistently represented any black female who dares to question sexism and misogyny as a betrayer of the race.”

I often feel simultaneously torn between two worlds and yet not fitting in either. I often feel as though I have to give up my identity as Asian if I want to be queer since it so often seems like the queer community is white. On the other hand, if I want to find community around a Chinese food and culture, being queer has to be left at the door.

I think it can be a difficult feeling to understand for some folks. I imagine someone asking, “Why do you feel like you have to leave something at the door or that both identities must be expressed?! I play basketball AND I love greek philosophy. I don't feel like I have to leave my basketball playing at the door when I go to my classics meetings. It doesn't even come up anyway.”

I can understand this confusion, I mean, it's not like I only feel comfortable in gay bars that serve Chinese food. But I think the difference is the overarching feeling that one of your other identities might not be understood or accepted. If basketball came up at a classics meeting, you could talk about it and you wouldn't give it a second thought. However, imagine if you knew that the culture in classics departments was that athletics were an immoral activity that only stupid, barbaric people pursued. Chances are that your basketball playing would never come up at a meeting; after all, what happens in one's own basketball court is nobody's business. However, something that you consider an important part of your life shouldn't be talked about.

For me, the feeling that I have to sensor certain parts of myself no matter where I go is tiring. And it's alienating. Sometimes it's hard for me to engage in a room with all white folks, even if they are LGBT, because I'm still on guard. If I let myself relax, I might get hurt when one of them says something really ignorant due to their white privilege. It's hard to form genuine connections.

I think one of the best examples is when I returned from Taiwan. There's this TV show, The Diamond Club. It's my favorite Chinese variety show ever. I think the host and her friends are hilarious. I often describe it as “watching youtube with your friends, but you don't have to click around to find the best videos AND all your friends are clever and funny and goofy.” I loved it and watched it nearly everyday with my grandmother.

The cherry on top? The host is transgendered, MTF.  AND THE SHOW IS STILL POPULAR! The kicker? In the States, it's hard to find people who can really share my excitement. It's not subtitled, so much of the humor is lost to people who don't speak Chinese well enough. And when I finally find someone whose Chinese is good enough, he says, “Man, that woman is so scary.”
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    What I've been reading:

    The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth's Past #2)
    ​
    by Liu Cixin

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    about this blog

    A place where I can write my thoughts on race, on privilege, on class, on being a doctor. Part of the endless struggle to become a little bit more enlightened and feel a little less alienated.

    Agree with me. Call me out. Pass it on.

    I post once or twice a month with smaller comments on mini-blog.

    about me

    My name is Jess. In the interest of full disclosure: I'm a 30-something-year-old Chinese American and believer that the quest for social justice and equity must be an intentional and active one. I'm a Family Medicine physician. I'm queer. I'm a radical. I grew up in a mostly white suburb and my parents are white-collar workers.  And I don't eat meat, but I miss it sometimes.

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