man demands "No blacks in the delivery room" - Page 2

Speical treatment:

Two people apply for the job with the same skills BY LAW the minority has to get it.

Black only scholarships

Black only miss america

Cops have to be very careful about pulling over minorites because of racil profiling.

If things are going to be equal they should be equal. Going from from extreme to the other isn't going to help anything.

yes, but there are also native american-only scholarships, some even differentiating by tribe...religious ones, ones for people with Polish ancestory...ones only men or women can win. is that special treatment too?


you really focus a lot on black people....

as to hiring practices, sometimes, that's the only way to let an equally qualified non-white male into a job. not all places have gracefully accepted the results of the civil rights movement, and therefore some of the practices that you are referring to are forced on companies. do i think it sucks? YES. But, i'm not bitter about it either...in time, such things will not be necessary for businesses or even some higher education facilities...because equal will FINALLY be equal, for all races, for both genders, for all religions, EVERYTHING.

it takes time for changes to occur, and this was one way for them to be pushed along i guess.

The thread is about a man yelling no black people in the room. So there for that is what it is focusing on.

If everyone is going to scream about things being equal they should be equal. Equal doesn't mean certain races get job because they are that race, and it means that people have a right to decide who they want in the delevery room. If I ever have a baby I might decided I don't want any men in the room other then my husband, that doesn't mean I hate men, that just means I don't want men in the room.

HBO is running a special this week about the slaves. It is really a sobering look at how the black slaves were treated. It is called Unchained Memories. I would recommend anyone here to watch it- perhaps it might change some views on the issue-

if equal is equal, then no one would care who is in the delivery room, because every nurse and doctor would be the same, not "colors", not genders....just doctors and nurses.

um, not to get too far off the subject, but, personally, I do see a difference b/w male & female in one certain thing - my ob/gyn is a woman, and when we have kids, the only man I would want in the delivery room is my husband! Not that men aren't capable of being professional, it's just that for certain things I'd rather only have other women around. Doesn't matter to me what color their skin is, just that they aren't men!

I'm not making light of your wishes tuxedokitties, but from personal experience my delivery staff could have been purple polka dotted aliens of some as yet unknown 3rd or 4th sex, and as long as they knew what they were doing I would have been perfectly happy. I just wanted the baby/babies OUT!!! LOL To go even further off point, I was happiest with a midwife in a hospital setting, she had been there and stuck around for the whole thing..didn't just run in now and again to check dialation and to deliver.

You are really confusing these issues.

The hospital situation was one in which the husband demanded that there be no black person in the room. That seemed to include all people, male & female, not just men, so I don't think the point you made earlier abt wanting 'no other man' in the room except your husband and the doctor had anything to do with this.

In the mid-1990's, it was discovered that a prominent NYC hospital had set up their maternity units in such a way that if you were middle class & insured, you went to a nicely furnishly, brightly painted unit but if you were uninsured or on medicaid, you went to a unit on another floor that was shabby and offered no amenities. Their practice was discovered when an affluent black mother to be was taken on a tour of the nice unit with her hubby, which was part of the maternity package at the hospital. But when she came in to have her baby, she found herself on the 'medicaid' unit which curiously was also mostly minorities. The admitting people looked at her face before they looked at her insurance. She complained abt the accomodations and was told there was no room on the other floor, which was proved to be a lie. This resulted in every hospital in NYC being investigated for their practices concerning patient's financial status vs. treatment. And before one suggests that Medicaid patients perhaps don't deserve amenities because they are on the dole, so to speak, at least in NYS, hospitals often get more money from Medicaid for a hospitalization than they do from employed patients covered by HMOs.

As someone else said, there are all sorts of x-only scholarships.
Cops had to be reminded re: indiscriminate racial profiling specifically because they were only stopping black people in the situations where this has been a problem, and in some cases it was department policies.

The difference between Miss Black America contests and the old Miss America Contests, is that minorities couldn't enter the Miss America contest which claimed to be representing AMERICA, not WHITE America.
I'm of Croatian descent: I wouldn't expect to be accepted as an entrant into the Miss Italian America contest for the Queen of the next Columbus Day parade.

It's kind of hard in this situation. The man, who would be considered the "customer", of the Hospital, demanded no Blacks. I think he's a total idiot. However, the Hospital supervisors were only doing as he requested. If I was the supervisor of the Hospital, I guess I'd tell the guy, that he and his wife would have to go elsewhere to have their baby.

I don't know if anyone has said this yet but, Saying No Black people in the room is like in a way asking for a female doctor instead of a male doctor, it's just something that people have to live with, people not feeling comfortable with other people of a different color or gender.

However I'm not racist.. Although at my school there are alot of blacks and even if you say arrh there's a black mark on my top they will swear at you and say oh that's being racist.

Racisim is pathetic- It's like the Germans thinking they were the master race.

I think that the way that you described this situation is not a valid comparison. I think gender differences truly are differences that mean something, for obvious reasons. That's a profound biological difference. I've never had a mammogram done by a male tech and would refuse to have one done by a male. But I've always have had the results of the xray discussed with me by male radiologists, and that didn't bother me at all, clothed and in an office.

Skin colour is just a difference in pigmentation in the skin that evolved over the millenia in response to various human environments.
It doesn't set people apart from one another, unless you make a conscience decision to let it do so. Given the long and unglorious history of how people of colour were treated in the US, and continue to be treated in some ways, requesting that all blacks leave the room doesn't have a rationale justification in 2003. It didnt have one in 1945 either, yet blacks had to use separate water fountains, were excluded from many places like restaurants, and when they volunteered to serve in the army in WW2 because they were willing to die for their country, were put in their own segregated squads, commanded I believe by a white officer.

I think that most people have reacted to this situation as being racist because it resurrects the ghosts of an unfair past. I think this man didn't want any blacks in the room because he didn't want a black man handling his wife, resurrecting an age old stereotype (a la "To Kill a Mocking Bird".)

Having worked in hospitals before, I think that what I (if I was the administrator on duty) would have done was to quickly gather the black professionals assigned to the delivery area, and ask them what they wanted me to do. I suspect they would have chosen to accede to the man's wishes because it wasn't worth their energy & emotions to forcibly deal with the man, and written him off as an a$$hole.

Had they chosen the other option, I would have allowed them to do their jobs as usual, after calling security in the event of a meltdown by the husband.

You know the old saying "There's only a limited amount of intelligence in the gene pool of life"???

Well, that guy obviously missed out on his entire quota.

These kind of people always think "Don't confuse me with facts, my mind's already made up!!!".


Mike (for Clyde)

I'm not sure about disciplinary action, since it was such a bizarre (and hopefully rare) occurance. But I do agree that the staffers should have booted the man (or at least threatened to) rather than bar the black employees. And they could have had security standing by if they feared some kind of violent reaction. I applaud the hospital for apologizing. Good for them!

I see no problem with having Miss Black America, Mrs. America (i.e. married America), Miss Plus-Size America, Ms. Senior America, etc. They are only defensive and natural responses to the slowness of the Miss American pageant to integrate itself, and/or its narrow definition of beauty/appeal. I mean, it's ludicrous that it took sixty years for the pageant to include a woman of color!

Same goes for HBCUs (historically black colleges/universities), affirmative action, and the anti-racial profiling movement. As a white woman, I personally have no problem with accepting the need for some "unequal" treatment, or special schools/programs/grants that go in favor of blacks. Let's face it, for 300+ years, the scales have been drastically tipped in one direction, with the social attitudes, culture, and very laws of our supposedly free land working against black people. This was tolerated and even given credence by our government (by allowing segregation and Jim Crow laws impeding voting) until embarrassingly late in the 20th century.

So while I completely understand that it may not seem fair to those who have not obtained jobs (or can't take part in Miss Black America pageants!), but y'know, that's a painful but necessary part of the process required to ensure the equality promised by the Declaration of Independence. Losing out on a possible job is a damn sight better than having to struggle against having multiple generations of your forebears who were dragged to a country in chains, lived/died/tortured under slavery, and were denied education, voting rights, and even the right to drink water from any fountain they wished. This kind of history of oppression puts people at a severe disadvantage, even now, and one can't expect it to be overcome in only thirty-five years.

So if it takes a few decades of extra boosting to make up for lost time, so be it. IMNSHO, anyway.

Thank you Lucia and Kira for explaining it well, I couldn't figure out how to do it without being politically incorrect