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Showing posts from November, 2013

Racism and Jeremy Lin: Being over-sensitive about being over-sensitive

Jeremy Lin, by most accounts, is having a an excellent season. After sub-par season in Houston last year, Lin is meeting the lofty expectations that followed him after he left New York. And he is no less important of a role model to Asian Americans.  This encapsulates the argument Jay Kaspian Kang puts forward in a recent article . Kang acknowledges the difficulty of negotiating two extremes - on the one hand, Jeremy Lin is a really big deal and on the other, we should act as it's perfectly normal for Asian Americans to make the NBA. We don't have the luxury to pretend we don't need Jeremy Lin or act as if he's not that big of a deal. Kang writes: It's discomforting to say, but the Asian American community still needs Jeremy Lin as a rallying point. The "Chink in the Armor"  moment marked the first time in my life that we, as a unified people, voiced our outrage. Since then, Asian American outrage has become its own meme. Some video will come out