11:15am | He was a man, take him for all in all, […] –Hamlet, I.ii.187
February is Black History Month. And there’s been the Proposition 8 ruling. Now the L.A. County Board of Supervisors has declared February 19 as a Day of Remembrance for the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans for the crime of having been born of Japanese extraction.
And, of course, there is “Linsanity.”
For those of you out of the basketball loop, Los Angeles-born Jeremy Lin is a point guard for the New York Knicks, and he’s been quite a bit like the NBA’s answer to Tim Tebow: a rookie who has energized his lowly franchise in entertaining fashion — even in his bungles (e.g., Lin set the all-time NBA record for most turnovers in the first seven games of a career, while simultaneously setting the record of most points scored in a player’s first five starts since the NBA/ABA merger). That Lin happens to be Asian-American unfortunately has brought an extra dimensionality to the story.
What’s unfortunate is not that he is of Asian extraction, but that anyone cares one way or the other. This is not, after all, like Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball. Not only is the NBA long past any sort of institutional interest in ethnicity –in fact, it’s been the most international of sports leagues this side of World Cup soccer — but Yao Ming (not Asian-American, but Chinese) completed an entire career before Lin ever took to the NBA hardwood. There are no actual barriers in the NBA for Asian players to overcome, save talent — the same barrier that every player must overcome as an individual. Jeremy Lin is talented enough to play the game — that’s all there is to it.
But because the perceived novelty of an Asian-American in the NBA has garnered a great deal of interest and controversy. Such as on February 10 when Foxsports.com writer Jason Whitlock tweeted during Lin’s 38-point performance against the Los Angeles Lakers: “Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight.”
As expected, Whitlock was roundly criticized for the bigoted remark1, so you’d have thought that was the end of this sort of bad badinage by major media outlets. But a week later, ESPN — one of Whitlock’s former employers — ran a story on Lin’s propensity for turnovers with the headline, “Chink In The Armor.” Really.
Could it have been unintentional? You almost think it had to be (as I imagine certainly was the case when ESPN anchor Max Bretos used the phrase during a broadcast), even if it did fall on the heels of the furor generated not only by Whitlock’s intentional slur but also by the fan sign featured during MSG broadcast of the February 15 Knicks game: Lin’s head rising from a fortune cookie like a genie from a bottle. Neither the sign nor the airing of it — nor the name of the network: it’s short for “Madison Square Garden” (sometimes you can’t make this stuff up) — seems ill-intended, but that is irrelevant to whether it would have raised ESPN’s awareness of issues out there right now concerning Lin’s ethnicity. ESPN has fired the headline-writer (and suspended Bretos for 30 days), but in announcing the decision the network unwittingly referenced another side of discrimination that no one ever talks about: taking more of a rooting interest in someone by virtue of his/her ethnicity (or gender, sexual preference, etc.).
“We again apologize, especially to Mr. Lin,” says the ESPN statement. “His accomplishments are a source of great pride to the Asian-American community, including the Asian-American employees at ESPN.” On the face of it the fact that the Asian-American community takes pride in Lin’s accomplishments is harmless enough. What can possibly be wrong with feeling good about someone else’s success — or about oneself? But it’s not the feeling good that presents the problem: it’s the rationale that someone’s (e.g.) ethnicity has anything to do with it.
Being an L.A.-area resident and feeling good about Kobe Bryant’s or Blake Griffin’s success is a different kettle of fish, because the Lakers and the Clippers are our geographical area’s representatives in the NBA. Sports are designed to be an “us versus them” phenomenon, a contest. In “real life” we discourage (don’t we? shouldn’t we?) splitting ourselves into “teams” as if our skin color is a uniform. Kobe represented the Purple and Gold at the All-Star game, not African-Americans. I fail to see any non-discriminatory logic by which an individual’s ethnicity makes him a representative for those of the same general ancestral origin.
Blake Griffin’s mother is Caucasian. Let’s say for the sake of argument no one of Caucasian ancestry had ever dunked a basketball anywhere near as well Griffin does (similar to the way when Dr. J so clearly took dunking to another level — for all players — when he first came on the scene). I imagine there would be (and are) some white NBA fans taking pride in Griffin’s high-flying accomplishments partly because of their shared ancestry.
Most of the people probably wouldn’t be anything like “white priders,” but I suspect that their voicing this sentiment such ancestry-based feeling about Griffin’s success would lead many to accuse them of racism. But would that be any different than the Asian-American pride in Lin’s success?
Then there’s the flipside of that logic: If it’s apposite for the Asian-American community to take pride in Lin’s success, isn’t it equally apt for Asian-Americans feel shame in his failure? If he is representing an ethnic community in success, isn’t he representing it equally in failure? (The same logic: An alumnus of Penn State may have in his life felt pride in the successes of the Penn State football program and more recently shame (or some sort of personal sting) at the recent molestation scandal.)
Barack Obama is the first African-American president of the United States. For me it was a proud moment, because my country — far earlier in its history than I expected –demonstrated the capacity of its populace to elect more than just white Christian males to its highest political office.
Undoubtedly for many of my African-American brothers and sisters (although not so much for those who voted for John McCain), there was an extra spice that I could imagine but perhaps not taste in the sweetness of his victory, could not taste because persons who “look like me” have never had any trouble getting into the White House. But it’s probably best that such pride end there. If Obama’s a great president, while national pride might be one thing (I know that, governmentally speaking, I didn’t feel particularly proud of my country during W’s term), I don’t see how his success is a reflection on African-Americans — any more than a Nixonesque sullying the presidency would be a blight on the black community. Barack Obama is an individual. By job description he represents the entirety of the United States, but he is a not a figurehead for African-Americans (men, heterosexuals, Chicagoans, etc.).
Or maybe, in sociological point of fact, he is. I don’t get to choose whom you pull for and your rationale for the pulling. All I can do is suggest that favoring an individual because his/her ethnicity (etc.) matches our own is the other side of the coin minted by discrimination (the bad kind).
Once upon a time is was commonplace for white Americans to talk about this or that black American being “a credit to his race.” We’ve since become sophisticated enough to see the bigotry inherent to such a backhanded compliment. Part of the bigotry therein is assigning an individual an ambassadorship of “his people” by the very nature of his ethnicity.
And if the practice is bad by nature of its very logic, it doesn’t matter which way the coin lands; we ought to melt it down and put the raw material to more lucrative use.
1Whether he was castigated for its also being witless, I know not.