After beginning
this course I was reminded of an article from last spring involving New York
Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin. Lin, a mediocre college player out of Harvard,
took the basketball world by storm, leading the stumbling Knicks to seven
straight wins. On the eighth game, however, Lin turned the ball over nine times
and the Knicks lost, leading ESPN to write a front page article entitled “Chink
in the Armor”. Complaints that the title was directly insulting Lin’s
Asian-American heritage arose, prompting ESPN to change the title within 30
minutes of publication and fire the editor who ran the story.
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| ESPN's mistake spread rapidly, through their website and their mobile apps. |
Although Lin
easily forgave ESPN (he actually went and visited the fired editor), was it
racist? If there is no intent, can it still be construed as a racist gesture?
As the nation’s leader in sports journalism, there is no excuse for running
such a story, whether the title was directed at Lin’s race or not. Since the US
is so diverse, large journalism producers (CNN, ABC, ESPN, ect) must choose their words with extreme
caution or run the risk of insulting one ethnicity and an entire nation. Despite
Chink in the Armor” not being the most insulting of racial slurs, there is no
reason for a company as large and prestigious as ESPN to be making such a big
mistake.
