In light of the whole CNN Jeremy Lin brouhaha.
Not when used to refer to a small opening in one’s armor, either literally or figuratively.
When used to refer to someone of Chinese ancestry, yes.
Not normally, no. I don’t know enough about this “Jeremy Lin brouhaha” to speak about it specifically. I pay pretty much zero attention to sports.
Your question is diversionary. I use the phrase myself and I am in a relationship with a Chinese guy! But using it specifically to refer to him would of course be racist. I don’t understand why this isn’t crystal clear.
It’s back to the old watermelon and fried chicken scenario. Saying I like watermelon and fried chicken is not racist (and also true). It might be a bit bizarre to just say it for no reason, but to say a black athlete sure loves his fried chicken and watermelon…different kettle of fish.
The phrase itself has nothing to do with Asians and isn’t racist. On the other hand, if you toss it out there while discussing a person of Asian descent and give people reason to think you might be making a joke about his ancestry, you can expect people to wonder about your intentions.
This with the addendum that the own-group members get something of a free pass. I had a Chinese friend who used to refer to FOBs, and to bad photos that “made [her] look all Chinky.” No one, Chinese or otherwise, objected to what would otherwise have been fairly appalling.
Particularly when he is most well known, to people who are not sports fans, for people punning (terribly) on his name.
So, no chink in the armor is in no way a racist term because a chink in your armor is an actual real thing. Saying that you have found a chink in someone’s armor doesn’t have anything to do with the Chinese people, but it’s not ok in this instance in much the same way that saying you are planing on crusading (for justice?) isn’t racist until you mention that you are actually sending troops to the middle east.
As a figure of speech, no. As a pun, yes.
Not to mention I don’t want to see another perfectly good word/phrase put off limits. “Chink in the armor” is as evocative visually as “Achilles heel” – “Oh, so that’s the one weak spot we can get at him with!”
It is now broadly believed that it is best not to use the word “niggardly” because illiterate offense-mongers have (completely without foundation) decided it’s offensive to black people. That’s a loss to the language.
Exactly. You quoted me mid edit while I was trying to shoehorn some of that idea into the post after the fact but yes this is exactly right.
The thing is that sports headlines frequently use puns and other plays on words, often using double meanings. So in this context, it certainly seemed to be a racially motivated headline. Whether that was the intention I don’t know.
Is it? Up until now, I don’t think I can remember the last time I heard someone using it. I don’t think people should stop using it, but I’m not really seeing what’s so absolutely fantastic about the phrase in general.
Exactly. I don’t get why this isn’t crystal clear either but consider the source of the OP.
Usually a perfectly acceptable phrase. When used to imply that an Asian person is a ‘chink’, it is offensive.
Particularly when he’s the first and only Taiwanese-American NBA player. I think there’s a slight difference between a race being under-represented in a field/sport/etc and being the only one. It makes his ethnic background so much more rare and the likelihood it wasn`t a racial pun much lower.
I’ll raise you one in that it has to be a very specific scenario to be racist. Saying that a person who is Chinese has a chink in their armor isn’t really that offensive, more because the slur makes no sense when you look at it. But if you have a body of people, of which a Chinese person is the member in question, and say the group has a “chink in their armor” it’d be more offensive because the “armor” could be interpreted as the group, and the chink as the, well, Chinese person.
I’ll join the “not by default, sometimes by context” group. In general, I really dislike when words and phrases are interpreted as being racist when their meanings are entirely unrelated to race in any way (as with the “niggardly” controversy in DC several years ago) but it seems like in this case the phrase was used in such a way that one could certainly question whether it was being used as a racist pun.
I didn’t know that. I don’t follow NBA but have kind of casually been following the Lin-sanity stuff on Twitter. It’s actually kind of cool that it took until just now for me to learn that.
Exactly. In this particular context it was offensive and incredibly stupid.
While I am all for refusing to let ignorance carry the day, let’s be sensible and acknowledge that “niggard” is just not a word you hear very often in modern times. It’s sort of funny to hear people complain about being deprived of the ability to use the word when I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone say it unless they were quoting Shakespeare.