Which itself is kind of racist. There was a story about him on the national news last week, and I kept waiting for the point of the story. There’s wasn’t one. It was “Asian dude plays professional basketball! People notice!” I mean, good for him, but why would that be news? I don’t follow professional sports, but I would assume that there are Asian-Americans in every one of them. If not, THAT would be news, not “Chinese-American basketball player exists!”
I’ve known the word “chink” as a slur a long time, but I’ve never heard it in speech. Is it a word people actually use? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anti-Chinese racism, though people being people I don’t doubt that it exists.
It really isn’t. Lin is the first Asian-American player in the history of the NBA. (There Knicks also had one Asian-American on the team in 1947, before the NBA was formed. He played in three games.) It’s one element of his unlikely story, and it’s not racist to point out that we don’t expect and have not seen a lot of Asian-American basketball players. It’s something people have not seen before and people have responded to it.
Is there a middle ground? Tell the guy it was stupid to use that phrase and simply ask him not to do such a stupid thing again. Is termination the only way to make a point these days?
It IS a legitimate part of the story; there’s no conclusive proof, but there’s reason to think that NBA officials/scouts/coaches might have underestimated Lin’s abilities because he’s Asian, and people stereotype Asians as brainy and unathletic.
This is why you shouldn’t make assumptions about things you “don’t follow”. Lin is the first Asian-American player to start an NBA game since Wataru Misaka in 1947, though there have been a half dozen non-American Asian players.
The point of the story is not just that Lin is Chinese, anyway. He’s also played incredibly well. He set an NBA post-merger record for scoring by a player in his first three starts, and then set one for first four and first five starts too.
He’s also the first Ivy League player to start more than five NBA games in something like 10 or 15 years.
Most importantly, he’s the first player to make the Knicks watchable since Patrick Ewing. If he was playing for the Bobcats, nobody would give a shit, but the Knicks are one of the NBA’s premier franchises and have sucked for decades.
So that should be the story: professional basketball is systemically racist against people of Asian descent, so much so that (unbelievably) there hasn’t been a single Chinese-American player before this guy. (Checks online: what about Yao Ming?)
Instead, what I saw reported was along the lines of, “Asians have their own hero!”
As I said, this was the one story I saw, so the other reporting on this guy might be covering the more newsworthy angles. The story I saw was focusing exclusively on his Asian-ness, and what that means to Asian fans (as if people only rooted for players of their own race). I didn’t think it was mean or oppressive, just a little patronizing.
I wonder if the firing wasn’t motivated in part by some guilt among ESPN management, as they realize how systematically they’ve excluded coverage of Asians over the years.
That’s not going to satisfy the general public. And if you are a cable network that relies on the good will of the TV viewing public, you need to address THEIR concerns as well as internal discipline.
Basically, if this was my company and it was the case of one of our VPs saying that about an employee, maybe the VP gets away with “sensitivity training”. And, in fact, this has happened a few times.
But if the same VP says that in public (while operating as an officer of the company) about, say, one of the Knicks, it’s suddenly a company-wide issue of credibility and accountability.
In purely practical terms, the damage control measures you take have to be proportional to the outcry.
Yao’s a Chinese national, not a Chinese-American. And certainly wasn’t born here or go to school here. There are other Chinese citizens in the NBA, but Lin is the first Chinese-American to play at that level in decades.
Some of the reply I just posted answers this, since my reaction was based on the one CBC story I saw and I really wasn’t generalizing beyond that. The fact that he’s the first player in a while to make the Knicks watchable is news. The fact that the league basically never hires Asian players is bigger news. The fact that an Asian is a good player, and Asian besides, is kind of racist, unless the media regularly reports on the ethnic heritage of key players. Do they?
Edited to add: Plain Chinese in America = Chinese-American, doesn’t it?
Double-edited: Since this is about race, I assumed that racism against Chinese-Americans would also include Chinese from China, but apparently not. I have a lot to learn about racism against Chinese-Americans, I guess.
Things like this do draw some casual fans to sports. People don’t only root for players who are like them, but many people do enjoy rooting for someone who is a bit like them: someone of the same ethnicity, religion, someone from the same hometown or college, and so on. The NBA did very well in China while Yao Ming was playing and this could bring in some more Asian and Asian-American fans. And Jeremy Lin is an Asian-American. He’s of Chinese and Taiwanese ancestry, but he was born in California.
Asians like Yao Ming, Ichiro Suzuki, Se Ri Pak, Michelle Wie, and 1/4 of Tiger Woods? No, it’s not guilt. It’s damage control in response to a dumb screwup.
I can assure you that the things that I have heard employees say in my company, that have sometimes (not always) led to disciplinary action would have resulted in firings if they had been publicized in the media. I’ll not get into specifics, in case someone can identify my employer from my other posts.
There is simply a different standard for what happens internally and what become public, whether it was intended to or not. When the company is faced with adverse publicity, they protect themselves by taking a harder line on racism (and other sensitive issues) than they do internally.
Just to be clear, I was not implying that making fun of his heritage was common. Maybe it is, but I haven’t seen it. What I meant is that his Chinese heritage has been in the news because he’s such a big hit in Taiwan right now. And while everyone knows about Yao Ming, there aren’t a whole lot of ethnic Chinese in the NBA. The puns have been using his last name, which aren’t necessarily racist: Linsanity, for instance. I don’t consider that a racial jab, as it could be done with anyone who had a name lending itself to punning.
Tiger Woods is more than 1/4 Asian. From his mother alone, he is 3/8 Asian (I believe she had one European grandparent), but his father is supposedly part Chinese, too. He’s probably closer to 1/2 Asian.
Most people would get fired for a minor ‘oops’ if it caused a shit-storm like this. If your employer is different, you’ve got a better boss than most.
[slight hijack]:
Do you have any examples of this? The only one I can think of is that where my mother grew up (where there were almost no black people) “brazil nuts” were commonly called “niggertoes”. It wasn’t until she moved to Bermuda (where there are many black people) in her 20s that she found out that a) the things even had another name, and b) the term was offensive, and she should start using the more common name. Any other actual examples?
[/hijack]
He was suspended for saying “chink in the armor;” it doesn’t sound like he was making a joke. While ESPN had options other than firing Federico, I think he’s acknowledging that he put himself in this situation and doesn’t have much room to complain about being treated badly.
I’d be willing to give the writer the benefit of the doubt on this one. I am aware that chink can be used as a racial slur, but I’ve seen it used as part of “chink in the armor” many times and I like to believe I’m sufficiently color blind that the potential racial context wouldn’t have occured to me without it being pointed out.
That said, given that it’s actually being used in reference to someone of Asian heritage makes it harder to ignore, particularly with all of the obnoxious puns. So it’s easy to think that it’s just another pun, except racist. But, realistically speaking, why would a writer intentionally use an obvious racist slur knowing that it would likely cost him his job. Even if he did it intentionally thinking he could cover it up with colorblindness or whatever, with as much publicity as Lin is getting, he’d have to be a moron to think he’d get away with it. And beyond that, the expression is particularly apt here because he’s been so well publicized as this amazing, out-of-nowhere, invincible hero. What other expression so succinctly describes someone who has appeared invulnerable then suddenly reveals a weakness?
That all said, I think firing the guy is going to far. I think that it’s an honest mistake is more likely than that it’s deliberate, and for all the editors that looked over it, none of them thought that maybe that phrase might be controversial? It’s unfair to fire him an absolve themselves of blame when certainly several other pairs of eyes saw the headline before it went on. So, if it’s an honest mistake for all of them to not think it was bad, why doesn’t he get the same.
I’m particularly peeved that we have to be this reactionary to a turn of phrase. This looks particularly bad because who it was referencing, but will we now not be able to use the phrase at all, or be really careful about who we use it around? Do we need to be careful about other phrases that include words that can sometimes be used as slurs against groups, or even just sound like slurs, but also have legitimate non-bigoted uses like fag, niggardly, spic, etc.? I really don’t like where this trend is going, the more we focus on this sort of stuff, the more we continue to emphasize our differences rather than our similarities.