Over the past couple of weeks, I have had numerous friends and colleagues ask me what I think of the Jeremy Lin situation. I don’t think I could be a Knick fan and not be Linsane but I always bring up not only the opportunity this has provided for the Asian American community and Ivy League players in the NBA but also for culturally insensitive comments. Saturday Night Live made some very interesting points about our willingness to speak about Lin in ways we would not speak about other groups, specifically African Americans.
There are ways in which we haven’t had enough recent experience with discrimination against Asians. And maybe that is a good enough excuse for the things that have been said and, as Stephen A. Smith says, we just need to be told we are wrong and apologize. But perhaps there is more going on here. If people buy into the model minority stereotype–that Asians are more White than they are minority–cultural insensitivity doesn’t come off as such and it is allowed in a way that it wouldn’t for any other group.
We have to recognize as a culture that while racism is attached to power, stereotypes can be applied at all levels and regardless of the truths we may find in some of them, they all have to be interrogated and evaluated. If nothing else, Jeremy Lin represents a mirror through which we can examine our often ethnocentric view of the world and a lesson in how to fix that.
