MINDY KALING’S FAMILY FEUD EXPOSES AMERICA’S CULTURAL DIVIDE, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes:

Mindy wanted a career in entertainment. Vijay wanted to become a doctor like his mother. But upon realizing how hard it was, he tried another route. He saw that a friend of his from a similar ethnic and educational background did not get into a single medical school. So he decided to pretend he was African-American.

Despite mediocre grades and board scores, he was interviewed by 11 of the 14 elite medical schools he applied to and was admitted to one. Though he made no claim to be disadvantaged — admissions committees were aware that his parents were well-off professionals, that he went to expensive schools and that he needed no financial aid — he was treated like someone who needed a leg up in life merely because he was black.

When the truth came out, critics jumped on Chokal-Ingam. Writing for CNN, Jeff Yang called the ploy “offensive.” The Daily Beast’s Stereo Williams says it is “insulting to what black people endure in this country, both institutionally and culturally.” Writing at Yahoo News, Jamilah King says, “What makes Chokal-Ingam’s argument especially hard to stomach is that it diminishes the hardships faced by black medical-school students and doctors.”

However ham-handed you find his bait-and-switch and the resulting memoir, the truth is that Chokal-Ingam said something perfectly obvious about affirmative action. When you give preference to one racial group, you take away something from another. Which is why so many South and East Asians are denied admissions to good universities across the country — when they are more qualified than the kids who do get in. According to “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal,” a book by two Princeton professors released in 2009, an Asian-American student must score 450 points higher on the combined math and verbal sections of the SAT to have the same chance of being admitted to an elite university as an African-American applicant.

But Chokal-Ingam is supposed to be ashamed of saying this aloud. Uttering racial truths in 21st century America is simply verboten.

Charles Murray, call your office.