Good afternoon, Charles. We had black dummies and white dummies at my school.
You may now return to your previously scheduled toke.

Ours were a sickly beige.

Ours were grey and faceless save for a rectangle slit where the mouth should have been.

It was a horrible experience.

Charles - the original dummy that you learned on was probably made by Laerdal. That face was the death mask of a young woman found drowned in the River Seine. They now offer black mannequins. You can find the history here:

http://www.laerdal.com/us/doc/367/Histor…

I'm a current CPR instructor. Most of the older dolls are white, but a few baby annies are black. The latest in CPR dummy technology, however, look more like avatar characters: a nice bright blue.

The CPR mannequins at medical school appeared to be either native american or southeast asian - I could never quite decide which. I don't think it's a racist thing.

@4 - Thanks for the fact of the day. That's interesting to know.

Now that you've got me thinking about it, all the female mannequins look like Amanda Knox.

@4: How on earth did you know that?!

The revolution will not be right back after a message
about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people or a white dummy.

I was way too focussed on the procedure to worry about skin color. Maybe I'm unusual in that, but the class was intensive enough to me to only care about doing it right, rather than doing it on the right person.

@4. Thank you. That's what I was going to write.
Seems reasonable that the Norwegian inventor might make the thing look Norwegian.
It must suck to go through life thinking everything is some racial hierarchy bullshit.

Mine was a discarded Nexus-6 prototype - or so it appeared. I only now realized that I - and all my fellow good Samaritans were being subconsciously encoded with a directive to save Replecant lives rather than my own white brethren.

Damn!

The last time I took a CPR class it wasn't even a full mannequin. It was more like an armless upper torso with a head. And it was a pasty sort of white, like it had never seen the sun.

I can see now that we were being trained to save zombie lives. But I thought zombies didn't have souls?

When I first took CPR, I guess we were only being taught to save the lives of women. The most recent time I took CPR, I guess I was being taught to save the lives of quadruple amputee men while being encouraged by Peyton Manning.

Charles, CPR certification is only good for 2 years at the most (Red Cross certification is only good for a year, American Heart Association is good for 2). If the last class you had was 25 years ago, go again. Techniques have changed pretty dramatically even in the last 10 years. And isn't it worthwhile to be able to help save any human life?

What do you call someone who distinguishes between "white lives" and "black lives" when it comes to CPR?

It *is* a shame that you weren't able to learn on a bunch of different dummies simultaneously, representing all the possible skin color and nose shape configurations possible on the planet.

@20 - OH SNAP!

You're probably accurately remembering the dummies as well as every witness that says a black guy did it.

Well by all means, don't give the next white guy you see in cardiac arrest CPR if it offends you so much.

You have permission to give black people CPR too, Charles, I promise.

Good Afternoon Charles,
Having taken CPR classes many times, I quite frankly never noticed the "skin" color of the mannequin. Heck, they're merely torsos. No, I don't believe they "maintain our society's racial hierarchy". I believe they are strictly utilitarian and are used to instruct/practice a particular procedure in order to save a human life.

A. I don't think this CPR/white race stuff worries you, hence you are lying. Worry is for wankers anyway.
B. 'Memories pretending to be inncocent' is yet another non-scientist effort of poetry to dumb down the complexity of brain function.
C. White lives aren't worth saving. They ain't got no boogie, no jive, no soul sistah. Every dead honky is a bonus for the true brothahood of man.

I've had both white (kind of taupe, to be literal about it) and black (dark orange-y brown) CPR dummies. In the various classes I've taken where one or both appeared, I always called them Prairie Dawn and Roosevelt Franklin, so I guess I've been taught to save the lives of muppets.

#20 also you're my hero.

@30:
>uselessly troll

Don't worry Charles, if you stop breathing my white ass wont save you.

I just found the coolest site for Rescue Animal training mannikins! (hm, "man"nikins, that's significant) The site includes "Critical Care Fluffy" http://www.rescuecritters.com/p16.htm

My CPR class had both white and black dummies, but the white ones were clearly superior.

@37: I see what you did there...

I have seen beige, brown and blue Annes

the animatronic simulation dummies are all white and male (beige with a selection of awful brown wigs) except for the one who gives birth, she is just white (the baby is asexual.)

I'm thinking "Black Dummy" would be a more appropriate title for this post.

I learned CPR from a black male and a black female. Fuckin sellouts!! Telling the man how to save a life!

No, Charles. It means you were taught to save human lives.

Of course the technique you learned is a quarter century out of date, so you'd probably cause brain damage (whether you used it on a black person or a white person).

Charles: "Ah, what a beautiful day in the concrete jungle. I think I'll go on the Slog and just be a fucking dickhead!

Damn I feel good today. I'm looking forward to going and just starting a bunch of totally pointless shit on Slog, and then sitting back like a fat drunk Buddha and watching everyone freak out. What a fucking great job I have.

I wonder why I feel so good. Could it be the music? Could it be my breakfast? Or could it just be the fact that I've made a career out of saying inflammatory shit that makes no sense?"

I, too, learned on a sickly beige-grey "white" dummy. She was covered in black smudges and had blue pen marks on her face where some previous high schooler had got creative. She was deep down the Uncanny Valley, unsettling to look at, repugnant to touch. Maybe her design was shaped by unconscious racism, but the permanently slightly sticky execution wasn't doing white people any favours.

There was a crazy twitter war going on yesterday between Joan Walsh (Salon blogger I think, maybe Slate?) and several African-American bloggers/tweeters (twitterers?) and the guy who writes Cultured State made the point that as a black man, race and racism are a part of his everyday life, not just a theoretical 'issue' the way it is for white liberals/progressives. When you see people crossing the street when they see you coming, of course you are going to notice the skin color of the dummies you learned CPR on. White people - myself included - for the most part will not notice because they/we are the 'default' - or dominant - race, the same as the white dummy.

Anyway, the point the blogger made - here is the link to his post - http://thusandsuch.wordpress.com/2011/05… is that telling a black person, or a woman, or an asian, or a LGBQ - take your pick - that voicing their reality is "unhelpful" is to deny their very identity.

Whether or not anyone else noticed the skin color of the dummy in their CPR class is irrelevant. Charles did and (I think) he's trying to make a point about it in relation to the dominant position whites hold in our society. The same can be said for the male body being the normal/default example of human anatomy in modern medicine even as science proves that females react to medical treatment differently than men. I think perhaps y'all are missing his point.

You're upset because white lives are less valuable to you than black lives? What the hell is wrong with you? Did you know that a black man's heart is in the same approximate location as a white man's? Did you know that breathing and pumping will save anyone's life, no matter his skin color?

Charles must be really bored

I forgot different races have completely different internal anatomy.

The end sounds like questions you should be asking your therapist.