Electrocardiograms and Faculty Make Up

2/26/09

I work in the Emergency Department at BroMenn. I'm a nursing tech, and one of our duties is to take Electrocardiograms (EKG's). The EKG asks you to fill out patient information, including race before you can begin the analysis. Anyway. The options include: Caucasian, Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific, Native American, Oriental, and a few others (which I cannot remember off the top of my head).

You have to enter in a specific age and name for the patient, but just by hitting "enter" through the fields "gender" and "race," surprisingly (not really) you get Male and Caucasian. Again, another example of how the norm is White Male, anything else needs to be clarified.

When I first started operating the EKG machine, when I saw "Oriental," it really made me mad. Oriental is a term reserved for OBJECTS. An Oriental rug, for example. A PERSON is Asian or a Pacific Islander. I'm not sure if these things would have upset me as much as if I had not been enrolled in this course when I started working at the hospital.

Another thing we talked about in class this week that kind of made me curious as to the racial faculty make up at Wesleyan. Here's what I found (faculty - staff photo gallery):

252 White
5 Latino
9 Black
1 Pacific Islander
1 Spanish
8 Asian
5 Middle Eastern

281 total

89.7% white

Anyway, upon my calculations of this, I realized that there are probably some faculty members who define themselves according to a different race, and I was unsure of how to classify these people. Race is really difficult to define. I had a lot of difficulty defining people as Middle Eastern or Latino, or Pacific Islanders. It would be interesting to send out a survey and ask the faculty how they define themselves and find out the actual percentage of the IWU faculty.

I asked three of my suitemates what they thought the percentages were, and the responses I got were 70%, 80% and 90%. The two who said 70% and 80% were very surprised.

I did this same exercise with magazines for the media project, but I will wait to disclose my results until after my presentation.