When Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam published a memoir last month called “Almost Black: The True Story of How I Got Into Medical School By Pretending to Be Black,” his sister, the comedian Mindy Kaling, allegedly said it would “bring shame on our family.” Chokal-Ingam told The Post that it was his sister who was the problem: “You play a slut on national TV, and you think this [book] will bring shame on the family?”

Poor Vijay. Like many of us, he has missed the memo from today’s PC society that being a slut is good. But pointing out that affirmative action can hurt others is bad.

Mindy Kaling’s family is the perfect microcosm of our topsy-turvy world. Understanding how these siblings got here may help us see how the rest of us did, too.

Chokal-Ingam and Kaling are the children of Indian immigrants. Their parents came to the US in 1979, the same year Kaling was born. Their father was an architect and their mother, who died a few years ago, was an ob-gyn.

The Chokal-Ingams settled in the Boston area, gave their children all the advantages and sent them to the best schools — the prestigious Buckingham Browne & Nichols for high school and then the University of Chicago for Vijay and Dartmouth for Mindy. And that, apparently, is where their paths really started to diverge.

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.

And so was his response to Kaling. Chokal-Ingam’s answer to his sister’s criticism was hardly elegant, but it was also accurate.

Kaling does play a slut on national television. In the current season, she is a single mother and adulterer caught in a love triangle with another man.

Nor does she feel at all uncomfortable filming these steamy scenes. In her memoir, she writes, “Obviously on-screen sex is not actual penetrative sex, but, as any religious high schooler will tell you, simulating sex can be pretty damn enjoyable as well,” she writes. And what about all those people watching? “To that I say, the more, the merrier!”

But God forbid you say that Kaling plays a loose woman on TV or that there’s anything wrong with that. Writing on Slate, Heather Schwedel said of Mindy’s brother: “Well, I guess we found the one person in 2016 who hasn’t heard the term ‘slut-shaming.’ Memo to Vijay: Pretty much all of society got together and agreed that criticizing a woman for her perceived sexual activity is a no-no! You could even make the argument that it’s cool to be ‘slutty’ these days, to look good in revealing clothes and be confident in your sexuality.”

Phew. It’s a good thing that Vijay and the rest of us have the media to set us straight.

Seriously, though, if we are meant to take our cues on these matters from the cultural elite, if they can succeed in telling us that what’s up is down and vice versa, what does that say about us? If we are so easily persuaded that sluttiness is cool or that any inconvenient truth about public policy cannot be said aloud, it says that we are weak, that our intellect has become as sloppy as our morals. And that should bring shame on all of us.