Posted on 02/23/2012 11:02:56 AM PST by presidio9
In the days since an ESPN editor slapped a staggeringly offensive headline atop a story about Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin — “Chink in the Armor” — the outrage has mostly simmered down to a question: What the hell was he thinking?
The editor, who was fired, insists that he intended no pun on Lin’s ethnicity — in which case he was guilty only of being bad at his job, because absent the racist reference, the headline is so stale it’s nearly senseless.
Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) has slammed that explanation as preposterous, condemning any use of the word “chink.” Lin himself has said he believes the slur was unintentional and advocates forgiveness.
Meanwhile, plenty of armchair commentators seem dubious of just how offensive the word “chink” really is, while positing that the headline was merely a gaffe, the kind of thing that might happen to anyone at 2:30 in the morning.
But all of this speculation is beside the point. The editor might well have made an honest mistake.
That is precisely the problem.
Most Americans — particularly those who are fastidious about cultural sensitivity and horrified by any charge of racism — don’t think they have anything to learn when it comes to Asian-Americans. They are accustomed to seeing us as model minorities, accepting us as honorary whites (often with the unthinking condescension that term implies) or dismissing us as foreign, exotic or irrelevant. They are not accustomed to one of us becoming an overnight basketball phenom — or to hordes of us shouting our anger at an egregious offense, as is now happening.
Put another way: People don’t worry about making fun of Asians. Not even when it comes to a slur that is, indisputably, as ugly as “the N-word.”
There is no other explanation for how the ESPN editor, whatever his original intention, didn’t think twice before posting the headline. Or for how, in recent weeks, sportswriters and anchors have referenced Asian eyes and penis size — and received, for the most part, only chuckles and winks.
We all have our biases and blind spots, crude jokes we crack behind closed doors. But most Americans carry a collective sense of responsibility for the wrongs committed against African-Americans (as we should), and it has become second nature, in a public discussion, to conscientiously check for words that might carry a whiff of racism.
We know that, in certain contexts, our intention matters less than what others read and see and hear.
That’s why it’s virtually unimaginable that any story about, say, an African-American who is shattering stereotypes and records but then stumbles as Lin did would use the word “niggardly” in the title (even though that word, unlike “chink,” is linguistically unrelated to any slur).
If, by some weird happenstance, that usage did occur to the headline writer in question, you can be sure that he would censor it before his fingers hit the keyboard, or the second he saw his own words on the screen — no matter the time, no matter his deadline.
Asian-Americans don’t seem to merit similar treatment.
Any discussion of our achievements — whether we’re talking about SAT scores or Lin himself — must be contextualized in our history, which is still obscure to all too many.
While this isn’t the place for a lecture, let us at least recall a few milestones in Chinese-American history, from the first coolies purchased to solve a shortage of African slaves; to the railroad workers whose bodies, in the form of 10 tons of bones, were shipped back to China once their hard labor was done; to the Chinese Exclusion Act; to the scientists recruited to strengthen the American military during the Cold War, only to be suspected of spying; to the many American-born victims of bullying still rampant today, with the most heinous recent example being Pvt. Danny Chen, who was driven to suicide partly by taunts that, I’m sure, made liberal use of the word in that headline.
My point is not to catalogue the horrors or to compare the sufferings of one race to another. Neither is it to stifle anyone’s freedom of expression — not least, a sports editor’s prerogative to make a bad pun.
As a writer myself, I don’t agree with Rep. Chu that we need blanket censorship of any word. Perhaps there are occasions when one wants to describe, say, a crack of light beneath a door or the sound of one glass against another or, yes, a weak spot in a suit of armor, and if there is absolutely no chance that a racial slur might be construed by a reader, then “chink” might be just the right word. Probably not, but who can say for sure?
My point is simply that Asian-Americans deserve the same level of respect, particularly when our ethnicity is part of the story, as any other group that has experienced systemic bias. That’s all we need to put that terrible headline behind us and get back to watching the game.
A colloquial term for the Common Pheasant in the USA, derived from "Chinese Pheasant".
More PC nonsense.
Dear God, I hope my daughter doesn’t grow up to be the melodramatic candy-ass this woman is....
“Black hole” and “niggardly” come to mind....sheesh
Roast Ringneck is indeed tasty, as long as you don’t blast it at the peak of its initial flush. It tends to fly straight away and a slight delay in firing will bring it down but with much less shot to spit out later.
That’s all I remember about my first one. Ptoo! Ptoo!
;^)
Ho Hum,
Just another knee jerk liberal pushing that tired, old myth that “whitey” is the only racist in the world.
I say to this clown Fei: “Hey, ‘pok malou’, you want a boat load of racist language? Go find out how many crude, rude insults chinese have for us.”
And they use them freely on a daily basis and think nothing of it at all.
Someone, somewhere, somehow has managed to push the “Self Destruct” button on our culture.
“Exactly. Not that the liberal media would even had an editorial slant...”
Oh my, you used the word slant. You must be a racist! /s
Apparently not since the person who actually wrote the headline got fired. If a similar headline had been written about Christians (of any ethnicity), the editor would have received an award, a raise and maybe a juicy bonus.
And by all accounts, Jeremy Lin has demonstrated exactly that.
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