“Asian American Journalists Association releases guidelines on Jeremy Lin media coverage”

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/asian-american-journalists-association-releases-guidelines-jeremy-lin-155822233.html

February 23, 2012

Given the media’s “Linsanity” surrounding Jeremy Lin, perhaps this was inevitable.

Following (justified) outrage over several examples of racially-insensitive coverage of Lin–including a headline published by ESPN.com which resulted in the firing of one staffer and suspension of another–the Asian American Journalists Association has issued a set of guidelines for media outlets salivating over the NBA’s Asian-American sensation.

“As NBA player Jeremy Lin’s prowess on the court continues to attract international attention and grab headlines, AAJA would like to remind media outlets about relevance and context regarding coverage of race,” the group wrote in an advisory. “In the past weeks, as more news outlets report on Lin, his game and his story, AAJA has noticed factual inaccuracies about Lin’s background as well as an alarming number of references that rely on stereotypes about Asians or Asian Americans.”

Among the “danger zones” identified by AAJA:

“CHINK”: Pejorative; do not use in a context involving an Asian person on someone who is Asian American. Extreme care is needed if using the well-trod phrase “chink in the armor”; be mindful that the context does not involve Asia, Asians or Asian Americans.

And:

“ME LOVE YOU LIN TIME”: Avoid. This is a lazy pun on the athlete’s name and alludes to the broken English of a Hollywood caricature from the 1980s.

AAJA urged caution “when discussing Lin’s physical characteristics, particularly those that feminize/emasculate the Asian male (Cinderella-story angles should not place Lin in a dress). Discussion of genetic differences in athletic ability among races should be avoided. In referring to Lin’s height or vision, be mindful of the context and avoid invoking stereotypes about Asians.”

The group added: “Stop to think: Would a similar statement be made about an athlete who is Caucasian, African American or Latino?”

Below are the AAJA’s guidelines in full:

THE FACTS

1. Jeremy Lin is Asian American, not Asian (more specifically, Taiwanese American). It’s an important distinction and one that should be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, who were Chinese. Lin’s experiences were fundamentally different than people who immigrated to play in the NBA. Lin progressed through the ranks of American basketball from high school to college to the NBA, and to characterize him as a foreigner is both inaccurate and insulting.

2. Lin’s path to Madison Square Garden: More than 300 division schools passed on him. Harvard University has had only three other graduates go on to the NBA, the most recent one being in the 1950s. No NBA team wanted Lin in the draft after he graduated from Harvard.

3. Journalists don’t assume that African American players identify with NBA players who emigrated from Africa. The same principle applies with Asian Americans. It’s fair to ask Lin whether he looked up to or took pride in the accomplishments of Asian players. He may have. It’s unfair and poor journalism to assume he did.

4. Lin is not the first Asian American to play in the National Basketball Association. Raymond Townsend, who’s of Filipino descent, was a first-round choice of the Golden State Warriors in the 1970s. Rex Walters, who is of Japanese descent, was a first-round draft pick by the New Jersey Nets out of the University of Kansas in 1993 and played seven seasons in the NBA; Walters is now the coach at University of San Francisco. Wat Misaka is believed to have been the first Asian American to play professional basketball in the United States. Misaka, who’s of Japanese descent, appeared in three games for the New York Knicks in the 1947-48 season when the Knicks were part of the Basketball Association of America, which merged with the NBA after the 1948-49 season.

DANGER ZONES

“CHINK”: Pejorative; do not use in a context involving an Asian person on someone who is Asian American. Extreme care is needed if using the well-trod phrase “chink in the armor”; be mindful that the context does not involve Asia, Asians or Asian Americans. (The appearance of this phrase with regard to Lin led AAJA MediaWatch to issue statement to ESPN, which subsequently disciplined its employees.)

DRIVING: This is part of the sport of basketball, but resist the temptation to refer to an “Asian who knows how to drive.”

EYE SHAPE: This is irrelevant. Do not make such references if discussing Lin’s vision.

FOOD: Is there a compelling reason to draw a connection between Lin and fortune cookies, takeout boxes or similar imagery? In the majority of news coverage, the answer will be no.

MARTIAL ARTS: You’re writing about a basketball player. Don’t conflate his skills with judo, karate, tae kwon do, etc. Do not refer to Lin as “Grasshopper” or similar names associated with martial-arts stereotypes.

“ME LOVE YOU LIN TIME”: Avoid. This is a lazy pun on the athlete’s name and alludes to the broken English of a Hollywood caricature from the 1980s.

“YELLOW MAMBA”: This nickname that some have used for Lin plays off the “Black Mamba” nickname used by NBA star Kobe Bryant. It should be avoided. Asian immigrants in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries were subjected to discriminatory treatment resulting from a fear of a “Yellow Peril” that was touted in the media, which led to legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act.

“The Subtle Bigotry That Made Jeremy Lin the NBA’s Most Surprising Star”

Taken from: http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/02/jeremy_lin.html

February 8, 2012

There hasn’t been much reason to cheer at Madison Square Garden this season. After over a decade of defeat and dysfunction, New York Knicks fans started the lockout-shortened season fairly optimistic that the NBA’s most storied franchise would return to prominence. But almost midway through the season, the team’s star players are battered and bruised and it’s struggling through a losing record.

Jeremy Lin wasn’t supposed to matter. But now he does. And that fact both unearths and challenges some deeply held assumptions about the place of Asian Americans in U.S. culture.

Fresh off of two stellar games in which the second year point guard clawed his way out of relative anonymity, Lin has suddenly become a factor for a team—and a city—that’s desperate to win games. Yet along the way, Lin, the deeply religious, American-born son of Taiwanese immigrants, is shattering stereotypes about who and what can make an elite basketball player.

On February 4, Lin shocked Knicks fans (and, from the looks of it, even some teammates) by coming off of the bench to score 25 points to help defeat the New Jersey Nets. He also had 7 assists and 5 rebounds, all career highs; he’d previously averaged just over 2 points per game in his young career. Two nights later, after being awarded the starting point guard position, Lin stunned the sports world again by scoring 28 points to lead the team over the Utah Jazz.

“I’m riding him like a freaking Secreariat,” Knicks Coach Mike D’Antoni laughed to the Times about Lin, accounting for the fact that Lin played all but 3 of the game’s 48 minutes against the Jazz. For his part, Lin maintained his humility, offering only that “God works in mysterious and miraculous ways.”

It was a pivotal moment for the Knicks, who’d been searching for a point guard all season. And to show just how unprepared the team was for his sudden burst of stardom, the team had to photocopy his bio into the game notes package because he was signed too late to be included in its regular media guide.

Regardless of how the rest of the season goes for Lin, and the Knicks, his moment in the spotlight is an important time to reflect on how the country views its Asian American athletes.

“Of course we’re far beyond the blatant discrimination that stopped players such as Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays from playing in the MLB, but there still is a similar psychological barrier that Lin is currently in the process of dismantling in front of our very eyes,” said Dean Adachi, an historian and lecturer of Asian American studies.

Lin is only one of a handful of Asian-American players in the NBA’s history, and the first in over a decade. Although 1950 is usually seen as the year when two black basketball players broke the color barrier, Japanese-American Wataru Misaka technically did it two seasons before in 1947-48, when he played for the New York Knicks.

Though Lin has consistently shown promise since his high school days—even leading his Palo Alto, Calif., high school team to a state championship his senior year—he was overlooked by both college coaches and NBA scouts. The first time he showed up to a summer league game in San Francisco’s celebrated Pro-Am tournament, someone at the gym told him: “Sorry, sir, there’s no volleyball here tonight. Just basketball.”

It was a precursor to the thinly veiled prejudice that Lin and other Asian American male basketball players often face after decades of racist caricaturing that’s stereotyped them as nerdy and un-athletic, wholly incapable of excelling in a distinctly physical sport like basketball. “The most glaring stereotype to plague Asian athletes is that they are too small to succeed at the highest levels—too short for basketball, too weak for football,” Adachi said.

That’s not much of a concern for Lin, who’s 6-foot-3. But media reports are filled with references to his immigrant parents, who are both reportedly only 5-foot-6, implying that he’s something of a basketball miracle. “It’s a sport for white and black people,” Lin told the San Francisco Chronicle back in 2008. “You don’t get respect for being an Asian-American basketball player in the U.S.”

Only Harvard and Brown guaranteed Lin a spot on their basketball teams. He chose to head East to Cambridge after being shunned by his dream school, UCLA, and his local university, Stanford. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that of the nearly 5,000 Division I men’s basketball players in 2006-07, there were only 19 Asian Americans. That  included numbers for Pacific Islanders and ethnically mixed Asian American players, according to the NCAA Student-Athlete Race and Ethnicity report. In total, that translates to less than 1 percent.

And when Lin’s hometown Golden State Warriors signed him just before the 2010 NBA season began, somecritics claimed that it was only a publicity stunt by the team in an effort to appeal to the Bay Area’s large Asian-American community. “Through no fault of his own, Lin stands at a bombed-out intersection of expected narratives, bodies, perceived genes, the Church, the vocabulary of destinations and YouTube,” wrote Jay Caspian Kang, who’s Asian American, about Lin’s electrifying play at Harvard. “What Jeremy Lin represents is a re-conception of our bodies, a visible measure of how the emasculated Asian-American body might measure up to the mythic legion of Big Black superman.”

But while the NBA may have been caught off guard by a player like Lin, basketball has long been hugely important in many Asian-American communities. Japanese-American basketball leagues have been around since the early 1900s in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, long before the game gained widespread popularity in the U.S. Over the decades, they’ve expanded to include other Asian ethnicities. The race-based leagues have garnered their share of criticism for being racially exclusive, but organizers have maintained that the leagues are important tools that help members develop a sense of community and preserve their ethnic identities.

The continued popularity of those leagues help explain some of Lin’s rabid fan base.

“Especially now that there are lots of Asian Americans growing up and playing, I have to try to hold my own in college,” Lin told the Chronicle during his Harvard days. “It’s definitely motivational and it gives me a chip on my shoulder.” That chip on his shoulder could become much more important as his NBA career continues. Oliver Wang, a writer and professor of Sociology at California State University at Long Beach, says that the obvious impact of Lin’s play is that he could inspire other young Asian-American basketball players to continue working on their games.

“It’s difficult enough as it is to get to the NBA,” Wang told Colorlines.com. “Without a few role models out there to inspire that interest, I think it makes it all the more difficult.”

Wang notes that while former players like China’s Yao Ming certainly helped change some perceptions of Asian men in sports, there’s still what he calls a “dividing line” between foreign-born athletes—who are often products of highly developed professional athletic programs in their home countries—and Asian-American kids today.

For Jay Caspian Kang, that difference has everything to do with familiarity, which is what makes someone like Jeremy Lin so appealing to many Asian-American basketball fans. “He’s a kid who grew up similar to them, to me,” Kang said. “He represents something different because of that than if he were just seen as an import from another country.”

“Sharing a Heritage With a New Knicks Star”

If you haven’t heard about Jeremy Lin yet, you will soon. Not only heralded as the new face of Asian America, he is also helping to transform racial boundaries – people of all walks of life are now embracing “The Yellow Mamba”, all the “LINsanity”. The fans in the photo below are wearing Lin facemasks, and in this case, “yellowface” carries a different connotation, one of empowerment compared to racism.

Taken from: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/sports/basketball/at-soho-bar-jeremy-lins-fans-share-his-heritage.html?_r=1

February 10, 2012

Su Nam, a graphic designer, sat in the booth of a SoHo bar Friday night and surveyed the raucous crowd huddled in front of the broadcast of the Knicks game.

“All the Asian-American guys want to be Jeremy Lin,” she said. “And all the Asian-American girls want to marry him.”

More than 50 people, almost all of them Christians and the children of Asian immigrants, gathered to cheer for Jeremy Lin, the most unlikely story in sports, and a star they could relate to like no other.

They clapped when the television showed him walking to the locker room in a gray V-neck sweater. They screamed when he was introduced over the loudspeaker as the Knicks’ starting point guard. They shook the room when he made his first basket in a 38-point effort as the Knicks beat the Lakers, 92-85.

Many of them were not even basketball fans. Jay Kim, 29, had not watched the Knicks since they were in the N.B.A.finals more than a decade ago. Greg Wong, one of the night’s organizers, admitted to falling asleep when he watches sports. “I don’t even follow football,” one woman said. “Wait, this isn’t football.” But those in the crowd treated this regular-season game as if it were the Super Bowl, handing out “Linsanity” posters, hollering at the screen in their freshly purchased No. 17 jerseys and asking the harried waitress for one more beer.

If Lin’s storybook week captured the imagination of New York City and the wider sports world, it hit the community of Christian Asian-Americans like a lightning bolt. “He is so much what I am,” said Stanley Lee, 28, who had been a Knicks fan for all of two days. He ticked off the similarities: Chinese-American, Christian and athletic. (Lee said he had completed several triathlons.) And they both were underdogs, too. “I know what it’s like to be picked last,” Lee said.

Everyone in the room had his own reasons to identify with Lin. Some had been following him his whole career, from his collegiate success at Harvard to his struggles in Golden State, Houston and New York. Others had not heard of him until last week. But the standing-room crowd cheered his every basket — 18 points at the half — and competed to trace a connection to him. One man knew someone from Bible study who knew Lin’s sister-in-law. Another had a friend in San Francisco who (perhaps) knew him at Harvard. Leonard Lin, 29, got obvious bragging rights, while one group tried to figure out if he attended its church. The winner: one woman said she had met him.

If basketball fans have delighted in Jeremy Lin’s fast-forward crossover and uncanny court vision, the crowd at Gatsby’s bar admired him for other reasons. “He’s bold about his faith,” sad Kim, 29, a videographer who regularly attends church. “He’s not apologetic about it. That’s something that’s impressive to me.”

Daniel Chao, a Los Angeles native, wore a Kobe Bryant jersey, but he bought a Lin jersey for his wife, Kendra. He said that Lin’s record of success, despite his humble beginnings and his many setbacks, had inspired him at his own job at a health insurance firm. “In Asian culture, you’re supposed to do hard work and you’ll get noticed,” he said. “All the hard work I’ve put into where I am — maybe I could be that executive.”

For a room crowded with bankers, teachers and tech entrepreneurs, Jeremy Lin’s rise had already become something of a fable, a basketball version of “The Little Engine That Could.” “He just keeps going,” Chao said. “He’s defying all the coaches who said no, all the teams that have dropped him.”

Many people in the room said they felt protective of Lin, nervous that he would stumble in the bright lights. They breathed easier as he knifed through the Lakers’ defense, but they knew his astonishing run could not last forever. When the final buzzer sounded, the room erupted in cheers and the D.J. turned up the music full blast. “He outscored Kobe!” Leonard Lin said. Kendra Chao, who had no interest in the Knicks before last week, pointed to the No. 17 on her jersey with a broad smile. She said she was excited and proud, but the rest of her sentence was swallowed by the noise of the bar.

But what would it mean for Lin, and his new fans who so identify with him, if his star begins to fade? Audrey Kim, a Korean-American who works in New York University’s admissions office, shrugged off the concern. “He’s already a success and made so many people proud,” she said. “He’s such an inspiration to young Asian-Americans.” She thought that he opened up a new field for Asian-Americans, and that Lin’s parents, who supported his basketball dreams, should be models for immigrants raising American children. There was a pause in the conversation. Daniel Chao spoke up. “I mean,” he said, in a slightly stunned voice, “an Asian-American dunked.”