Federico WAS an editor. It was part of his job to review the headline.
So, let’s grant it was a mistake. It still means he’s incompetent. Maybe not in an every day normal situation sense but incompetent enough to question his fit for the job.
It’s the classic situation: malicious or incompetent. Either way, it looks bad.
It’s quite the reverse of this. It’s bad precisely BECAUSE those differences in attitude still exist. When racist attitudes go away, headlines like “Chink in the Armor” can be used without anybody noticing. It’s only an issue because those attitudes are still prevalent in our society.
You aren’t going to make those things go away by ignoring them and pretending things are so tra-la-la dandy that we’re simply overreacting to an innocuous situation.
Because the job of the headline writer is to get people to click through to the story (or read it, if it’s in print) if they might not have done so otherwise[1]. One way to do this is through humor or shock value, and being mildly transgressive is one fairly easy way to achieve one or both. In this case, assuming it was intentional, the writer made a very bad judgment about how his joke would be received. (Or he just didn’t realize it, which is a different kind of bad judgment).
[1] For instance, the person who wrote this headline got massive, lasting international attention for a minor wire-transfer story that no one would otherwise have remembered the next day.
Though I could understand the implication of the OP’s title, I do not pay attention to sports at all so the furor over this is really news to me.
I guess. If I saw this headline in the sports page, I don’t think my first assumption would be, “Wow, they must be talking about someone of Asian heritage crudely.” It’s just a common idiom.
Now, I am not trying to deny that words take on their meaning in a full context, and the context I provided differed in a rather important detail. Double entendres have their place precisely because of the sneaky way they can be worked into an otherwise polite conversation, an effect used for crude jokes as well as hostility probably since language was first spoken. If those in the know assure me that there has been an endless barrage of Asian puns and racial comments, then it is quite possible that this headline was an example of a racial slur. But it sure wouldn’t be my first, second, or even third assumption.
I believe it is an extremely common idiom in sports. But not being a fan of almost all sports, I’m probably not the guy to know. Still, I agree.
Of course we do. Isn’t that just common sense? It’s not fair to assume that someone is a racist just because they use a word that has one offensive meaning, but it’s always smart to consider how people will interpret what you’re saying.
I think it’s not necessarily fair to compare extemporaneous speech to printed communication, where there is time to reflect and an editing process. But you can rest assured that people would look askance at a headline that said President Obama’s fiscal policies were “niggardly,” at a headline that said Barney Frank is retiring from Congress because he’s “fagged,” or … make up your own examples. I am sure that in the U.S. the non-offensive meaning of those words are less well known than the cliche “chink in the armor,” so it’s not an exact comparison, but it really goes without saying that you want to avoid terms that can potentially cause offense. There is always more than one way to write a headline.
The headline ran undernear a prominent picture of Lin, of course. Maybe a couple of us are taking it for granted that people would expect that. Here’s what it looked like.
We weren’t talking about “people who were racist against Chinese-Americans”. We were talking about a news story you thought was racist because Jeremy Lin couldn’t possibly be the only Asian-American player in the NBA - and about Yao Ming, who you appear to have thought was also Chinese-American.
Yao Ming is undeniably of Asian descent. He is not, as you and other correctly pointed out, Chinese-American. I didn’t do thorough research and made a mistake, there.
Fine: have it your way. Focusing on Lin’s Chinese heritage as newsworthy is no more remarkable than focusing on any other player’s ancestry, which the sports networks do all the time. We now return you to the thread in progress.
I got a kick out of the headline. I think that is all that matters to me. If others have a problem with it, they should voice their concern to ESPN, which they did. ESPN handled the manner internally and made the best decision that they felt they could make, which was to appease the complaints by terminating the employee.
It’s not fair, but then again it’s also not fair how in many states employees can be fired for being gay, or terminated due to an arrest or conviction. The bottom line is that if an employer does not wish to have you on payroll then you’re fired.
It’s clearly designed to be a pun, whether or not the headliner was trying to be offensive was irrelevant. His intent is irrelevant as more people were adamantly outraged than adamantly amused.
It’s newsworthy in the same way that it was newsworthy that Thurgood Marshall was the first minority Supreme Court Justice. It would be nice if we didn’t have to think of Marshall as the first black justice, but we all do. What matters isn’t whether we think about race, but whether we make assumptions on the basis of it.
Correct, it is impossible due to the human condition not to notice the difference between ourselves and others, and to pass judgments based on this.
I guarantee that everyone passes some sort of judgment the instant they receive any information about another, whether it be that person’s opinions, physical appearance, relationships, or reputation.
Lin is no different. It’s newsworthy because the Asian American population is heavily underrepresented in the NBA if one just looks at population percentage. It is also newsworthy because of the large NBA following in China, and a Chinese American is playing in the NBA.
I smile every time I hear a story about somebody from Delaware. It’s newsworthy to me.
Who knows? But I can’t help thinking that an Asian-American writer probably would not have written a headilne using a word that is used as a slur against Asians.
Okay. And the problem with that? I’ll grant you I’m one of the first (and my family will attest to it) to yell that people who make a living using the language ought to know how to use it, but I still maintain that, dumb or not, this could very well be an unthinking use of the phrase. In which case it probably shouldn’t be a firing offense. Nobody is going to care about my opinion and it’s too late, anyway, but I don’t see a good reason to assume malice or intent when quick thoughtlessness is just as possible.
I guess I’m the only person in the world that pronounces the word CHINK as kink.
I swear I always read it as kink in the armor.
I guess you learn something new all the time.
Archie Bunker used to use the word all the time. Of course we can’t call “chink” the “c-word” like we do with the “n-word” as the “c-word” means vagina.
