#LinSanity and the Blackness of Basketball

#LinSanity and the Blackness of Basketball

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackman

Over the last week, there has been significant discussion about how race is playing out within the media and fan reception of Jeremy Lin. Focusing on anti-Asian slurs, prejudice, and stereotypes, the media narrative has not surprisingly provided a simplistic yet pleasurable narrative. Imagining racism as simply bias that can be reduced through exposure and education, the media discourse has erased the powerful ways that sports teaches race and embodies racism.  As Harry Edwards argues, sports recapitulates society, whether it be ideology or institutional organization.

According to Marc Lamont Hill, professor of education at Columbia, “blackness is at the center” of the media’s Linsanity.  Seeing basketball as a space of blackness, “the whole undertone is irony, bewilderment and surprise.”  Harry Edwards, Sociology Professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, highlights the predicable narrative, which reflects the fact that “we live in a niche society.”  This encourages people to “retreat into traditional storylines.” Irrespective of facts or specifics, the deployed media narrative has retreated to a place that depicts the NBA as a black-league defined by athleticism and hip-hop that is changing before our eyes.  The arrival of Jeremy Lin, who the media continues to cast in the role of the “model minority” whose intellect, personality, and overall difference is providing the league with something otherwise unavailable, is constructed through a narrative black-Asian conflict.   

Replicating stereotypes, the undercurrent of the Lin narrative, the media inducted fantasy, has been his juxtaposition to the league’s black players.  “Discussions about the NBA are always unique because the NBA is one of the few spaces in American society where blackness, and specifically black masculinity, is always at the center of the conversation, even when it's not.  Power is often defined by that which is assumed, as opposed to that which is stated,” noted Todd Boyd, Professor of Critical Studies at USC, in an email to me.  “Because black masculinity is the norm in the NBA, it goes without saying. Concurrently any conversation about race in the NBA inevitably refers back to this norm.  In other words, people seldom describe someone as a ‘black basketball player’ because the race of the player is assumed in this construction. 

So any current discussion about Jeremy Lin is taking place within the context of a league and its history where the dominant players have long been black men.  Lin is ‘the other’ as it were, but here the standard is black, not white, as would normally be the case in most other environments.”   From the constant references to his being “humble” and “team-oriented,” to his widely circulated idea that he came out of no where and that his career is one of low expectations and being overlooked, the media narrative has imagined him as the anti-black baller.  The stereotypes of both Asian Americans and blacks guide the media narrative. 

According to Oliver Wang, “Some in the Asian American community are following "Linsanity" with caution, especially as commentators praise Lin for being "hard working," "intelligent" and "humble," words associated with long-standing stereotypes of Asian Americans. Chuck Leung, writing for Slate.com, expressed the fear that "beneath this Linsanity is an invitation for others to preserve these safe archetypes."  Whereas black ballers are defined/demonized with references to selfishness and ego, a sense of entitlement that comes from societal fawning, Lin purportedly provides something else. Compared to black players, who are defined through physical prowess and athleticism, Lin, who is 6’3”, extremely physical and athletic, the media has consistently presented him as a “cerebral player” whose success comes from guile, intestinal fortitude, and determination, seemingly discounting his physical gifts and his talents on the floor.  Marc Lamont Hill noted a report that described Lin as a “genius on the pick n’ roll.” Continuously noting his Harvard education, his high school GPA, his college GPA, and his economics major all advance the narrative of his exceptionalism and his presumed difference from the league’s other (black) players.  

On Weekends with Alex Witt, Sports Illustrated columnist and Lin friend Pablo Torre celebrated Lin as a “student of the game,” and as an anomaly.  Torre noted that Lin watches game footage at halftime, a practice he says isn’t seen within the NBA.   While David West of the Indiana Pacers told me that watching footage is standard practice with the NBA, its usage here is just another example as how Lin is being positioned as NBA model minority and the desired body outside the sports arena.

Reflecting on the nature of this discourse, Hiram Perez in an essay about Tiger Woods, describes “model minority rhetoric” as both homogenizing the Asian American experience through professed stereotypes and celebration of Asian American accomplishments, but “disciplin[ing] the unruly black bodies threatening national stability during the post-civil rights era” (Perez, 2005, p. 226).  The caricatured and stereotyped media story with Lin illustrates this dual process, one that reifies stereotypes concerning Asian Americans while at the same demonizing blackness.  Historically, the model minority discourse has work to juxtapose homogenized identities, cultures, and experiences associated with Asian Americans and African Americans. 

According to Anita Mannur, “in recent years Asian Americans have been praised (in contrast to blacks and Latinos) for having ‘assimilated” so well” (Mannur, 2005, p. 86).  In other words, Asian Americans exists as a “model minority” within the national imagination “because they [seen] are hard workers” who “do not make a fuss, and are not loud” (Mannur, 2005, p. 86).  Likewise, Feagin and Chou argue that, “Asian Americans serve as pawns in the racially oppressive system maintained at the top by whites” (2008, p. 17).  Functioning in a “middling status,” (Feagin and Chou, 2008, p. 17) or as “racial bourgeoisie” (Matsuda qtd. in Feagin and Chou, 2008, p. 17), Asian Americans sit between whiteness and racial otherness within dominant racial discourse.”  The racial fantasy and the narrative offered through much of the media replicates these dominant frames with ease given the racial landscape of the NBA. 

Nancy Abelmann and John Lie encapsulate the interconnectedness between model minority, racism, and the condemnation of blackness: 

The American dream presents a problematic ideal of individual life and community.  More crucially for our purpose, however, the constellation of attitudes and institutions that constitutes the American dream has found a powerful articulation in the contrast between the model minority and the urban underclass: Korean Americans embody the American dream, while African Americans betray its promise.  The ideological constitution and construction of the “black-Korean conflict” should alert us not only the importance of the broader political economy but also to the necessity of rethinking dominant American ideologies (Abelmann & Lie, 1995: 179-180).

We can say that ultimately that America’s love affair the Jeremy Lin narrative is a love of what he purportedly says about America, about the American Dream, and model minority, all of which gains meaning in relationship to blackness.

In this regard, his media power and rhetorical utterances embodies an anti-blackness.  In “Lin is transcending race and helping to shatter stereotypes,” Shaun Powell defines Lin’s powerful cultural message through accepted stereotypes of both Asianness and blackness:

Lin was ignored in high school, wasn't drafted by an NBA team, couldn't stick with two of them, had to beat the bush leagues and then slept on a sofa because he wasn't sure the Knicks would keep him. Then he caught fire overnight. The first time he scored 38 points in a basketball game in his life, it came against Kobe Bryant. Because nothing was ever expected of him, and no fuss was ever raised over him until a week ago, he isn't spoiled by nature. He's humble and free of the jersey-tugging, preening, gesturing, chest-thumping culture that has polluted sports and soured it for many. That's all part of the legend and the lore by now, and that's why he's getting lots of underdog love.

In an article that deploys all of the main themes of the media’s Linsanity  -- (1) Lin as facilitator of colorblindness, as stereotype fighter and dream maker; and (2) as a story of Lin’s fortitude in overcoming discrimination  -- Powell focuses his attention on recycling the model minority myth, a narrative fantasy that garners value through the demonization of black ballers.   Powell describes Lin “as a gift from the basketball gods to the NBA, which in the past dealt with racial backlash when the league was considered too black to appeal to white America. That ‘game’ has changed, and because of Lin, there's plenty more distance between those days and now. Folks who seldom or never watched the NBA are suddenly into the league and wondering what a certain player will do next."  Depicting the league as undesirable and unwatchable for parts of white America, Powell celebrates Lin as anecdote to cure the NBA’s woes.  He makes clear that the problems facing the NBA emanates from the failure of its black players.  While he argues that Lin shatters stereotypes he simultaneously invokes model minority stereotype and the undesirable hip-hop (black) baller. “Because nothing was ever expected of him, and no fuss was ever raised over him until a week ago, he isn't spoiled by nature. He's humble and free of the jersey-tugging, preening, gesturing, chest-thumping culture that has polluted sports and soured it for many. That's all part of the legend and the lore by now, and that's why he's getting lots of underdog love.”   Similarly Jason Whitlock positions Lin as the alternative to hip-hop within the NBA:

Lin's success, even if it disappears, should not be dismissed. There is something to be learned from the results of his play and the absence of two star hip-hop, AAU athletes, 'Melo and Amar'e.

Yes, I played the hip-hop culture card. Hip-hop music is a capitalistic success. Hip-hop culture is an utter failure. The me-first, rebellious, anti-intellect culture directly contradicts all the values taught in team sports and most of the values necessary to sustain a civilized society.

Ignoring the fact that Lin can often be seen at time-outs chest bumping with his teammates, ignoring the fact that he flossed his jersey following a 3-pointer against Dallas, and the fact that he often “opens his mouth to reveal a Now and Later-stained tongue” Powell, Whitlock and others demonstrates the ways in which racial fantasy operates here.  Lin is a product of and reflective of the hip-hop generation ballers yet Powell and others imagine him in opposition to the polluting influences of the league’s black ballers.  Todd Boyd makes this clear:

Consider the stereotypes about NBA players and then consider the stereotypes about Asian Americans in our society.  Much of the public discussion about Lin has been informed, consciously or unconsciously, by the notion of the "model minority," which of course is a stereotype often used in relation to Asian Americans.  This is not Lin saying such things about himself, but what others have projected upon him.  With this in mind, an Asian American from the Bay Area who went to Harvard, is quite vocal about his traditional Christian beliefs, and who got cut a few times before finding his niche, is always going to be easier to support for some people than a rich urban black guy who whose style and whose actions suggest that he is indifferent to the dictates of mainstream society.  Though there are many people who are genuinely proud of Lin for all the right reasons, there are certainly others whose celebration of Lin masks some deeper resentment relative to their own perceptions about black players. 

There is a lot to celebrate with Jeremy Lin.  He is ballin’ and it’s a great story.  The pride and celebration that his success has brought is equally powerful.  Yet, I am increasingly left with a sour taste in my mouth from the persistent efforts to rehash and recycle longstanding stereotypes of both Asian Americans and African Americans.  The celebration of Lin in this context is no celebration at all, but another racial fantasy that validates American exceptionalism and the American Dream.  The media discourse is saying much more about us than Lin himself or his game, and it is this media framing, which is about tiresome as anything else. 

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

Pride and Prejudice: Jeremy Lin and the Persistence of Racial Stereotypes

Pride and Prejudice: Jeremy Lin and the Persistence of Racial Stereotypes

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

The recent success and national visibility afforded to Jeremy Lin has both inspired Asian Americans and has been driven by the adoration and pride he elicits from some within the community.  Whether on twitter, Facebook, or in the stadiums, it is clear that Lin is not simply a national phenomena but a treasure for the Asian American community. 

According to Jamilah King, “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.”  Whereas past Asian athletes, whether it be Yao Ming or Ichiro captured the global Asian Diaspora’s imagination, Lin is the most widely recognized Asian American athlete on the American team sport scene.  Timothy Dalrymple highlights the appeal of Lin to Asian American males:

He particularly has a following amongst Asian-Americans.  And some Asian-American young men, long stereotyped as timid and unathletic, nerdy or effeminate or socially immature — have fought back tears (which may not help with the stereotype, but is understandable under the circumstances) as they watched Jeremy Lin score 25 points, 7 assists and 5 rebounds for the New York Knicks.

In “Asian Americans energized in seeing Knicks' Jeremy Lin play,” J. Michael Falgoust elucidates his cultural power within the Asian American community in quoting the thoughts of several different people:

"I don't care about the outcome. I just want to see him in action. He's as good of an Asian American athlete as there is” — Rose Nguyen

"I'm so proud. I don't care if he is Chinese or Korean. I had to see him … my boyfriend has been talking about him so much" — Christine Lee

"I'm really excited. He breaks so many stereotypes. And my friends are just as excited. If you go to my Facebook feed, it's all Jeremy Lin. I like that he plays smart. But then he's from Harvard. So that is expected. He is also humble. He reminds me a lot of Derrick Rose, who's always crediting teammates” — Andrew Pipathsouk

Andrew Leonard similarly argues that Lin’s popularity amongst Asian Americans is emblematic of the power of social media and also the pride that athletic success garners for Asian Americans, otherwise seen as “nerds” not “jocks.”  While problematically invoking the language of “genetics” that erases Lin’s tremendous athleticism/speed, Leonard concludes that Lin inspires Asian American kids who yearn for a masculine role model given persistent invisibility and anti-Asian racism within the public square. “He’s a triumph of will over genetic endowment, a fact that makes him inspiring to an entire generation of Californian kids restless with their model minority shackles,” he notes.

On Monday, the social media world was also getting worked up about Michigan Republican Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra’s racist Super Bowl ad,featuring a Chinese woman (labeled “yellowgirl” in the HTML code for the Web version) gloating over all the jobs her country was taking from the U.S. Once thrown into the 24/7 crazy cultural mashup perpetual motion machine, it didn’t take long before anger about that ad ran head on into Jeremy Lin pride. I have seen tweets urging Jeremy Lin to run for the Republican nomination for the Michigan senate seat, tweets warning that the only American jobs in danger from Asians are those belonging to New York Knick starting point guards, and even a tweet riffing off Kobe Bryant’s self-identification as “black mamba” — Jeremy Lin is suddenly  the “yellow mamba.”

Lin has trended #1 on twitter on three successive game days, was top-10 searched items on Sina Weibo and is all the talk of the sports world.  For the moment, it is Jeremy Lin’s world and we are all just living in it.

                                         

The pride and possibility reflects the broader erasure and invisibility of Asian Americans within popular culture (minus this year’s Top Chef).  “Asians are nearly invisible on television/movies/music, so any time I see an Asian on TV or in the movies, I feel like I’ve just spotted a unicorn, even though usually, I see them being portrayed as kung-fu masters/socially awkward mathematical geniuses/broken-English-speaking-fresh-off-the-boat owner of Chinese restaurant/nail salon/dry cleaners,” writes one blogger. “Anyway, this phenomenon is 10x worse in sports.  While there has been some notable progress with Asians in professional baseball, Asians are all but non-existent in the big three sports in the US (football, basketball, baseball).”   

Lin breaks down, or at least penetrates, the walls that have excluded Asian Americans from popular culture.  The pride, adoration and celebration reflect this history of exclusion, a history of erasure, and invisibility.  The efforts to link Lin to Nike’s “Witness” campaign is illustrative in that we are all witness, maybe for the first, time in history, of an Asian American sports hero, someone who challenges and defies expectations and stereotypes.

Amid the invisibility is a history of feminization of Asian American males.  When present within media and popular culture, Asian American men have been represented as asexual, weak, physically challenged, and otherwise unmasculine.  Sanctioning exclusion and denied citizenship, the white supremacist imagination has consistently depicted Asian male bodies as effeminate.  The entry of Lin into the dominant imagination reflects a challenge to this historic practice given the power of sports as a space of masculine prowess.  

Whether shock or celebration, Lin’s cultural power rests in his juxtaposition to the stereotyped Asian American male.  According to Timothy Dalrymple, “their astonishment at the sight of Jeremy Lin outperforming the other players, their consistent references to how exhausted he must be, and how “magical” a night he’s having (rather than a natural result of talent and hard work) suggests that they’ve bought into the stereotype of the physically inferior Asian-American male.”

Lin’s recent ascendance is not simply about success or dominance within the sports world, a place defined by masculine prowess.  It reflects the cultural and gendered meaning of basketball.  Lin is excelling in a world defined by black manhood, an identity the white racial frames construct through physicality, strength, speed and swagger.  Unlike other players who burst onto the American scene (Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian, Wang ZhiZhi), Lin is a guard, who has found success because of his athleticism and skills as opposed to his presumed freakish stature.  “The best part is how viscerally pleasurable it is to watch Lin play: His game is flashy, almost showoffy, and requires him to have guts, guile and flair in equal measure,” writes Will Leich. “The drama of it is, it's obvious, what's most fun for him. It is all you could possibly want as a feel-good story. “

In other words, Lin’s appeal comes from his ability to ball like a street player to face off and dominate against black players at “their own game.”  The celebration of Lin as a challenge to the denied masculinity afforded to Asian American males reflects the ways in which black masculinity is defined in and through basketball culture.  While surely offering fans the often-denied sporting masculinity within the Asian body, the power of Jeremy Lin rests with his ability to mimic a basketball style, swagger and skill associated with black ballers. 

Pride emanates from the sense of masculinity afforded by Lin, a fact that emanates from stereotypical constructions of black masculinity.  “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” (cited by King in Colorlines)

Fulfilling a fantasy for a “white American fantasy of an athletic prowess that can trump African-American hegemony in the league” (Farred, p. 56) and the appeal of a masculinity defined by its association with blackness, the celebrations, parties, and various public adoration are wrapped in these ideas of race, gender, and nation.   Writing about Yao Ming, Grant Farred, in Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA, reminds us about these issues:

The body of the athlete, which has a long history of standing as the body of the nation, is simultaneously reduced and magnified in the Yao event, in its micro-articulation (Asian-American), it is asked to refute the myth of the feminized ethnic by challenging – and redressing the historic wrongs endured – those ‘American’ bodies that have been dismissed the physicality of the Asian male.  As representative of the Chinese nation, Yao is expected to remain a national subject even as his basketball heritage seems difficult to unlearn and continues to disadvantage him in the NBA. . . . In his representation of the ‘Chinese people,’ Yao will not become an NBA – which is to say ‘African American’ – player.  He will not trash talk, he will not develop an ‘offensive personality,’ in more senses than one, and to his detriment, he, will not become more ‘physical’ (62)”

Lin is confined by this trap, so his wagging tongue (that was blue during one game), his trash talk, his swagger, his reverse layups, his flashy speed, and now his dunk, all confirms that Lin isn’t just a basketball player but a baller.  The celebration is thus, wrapped up in the dominant configurations of blackness, and how hegemonic visions of black masculinity confer a certain amount power to Lin.  According to Dave Zirin, Lin’s power rests with his transgressive play: “Asian-Americans, in our stereotypical lens, are supposed to be studious and reserved. We would expect nothing less than that the first Asian-American player would be robotic and fundamentally sound; their face an unsmiling mask.”  While Lin is not the first Asian-American to play professional basketball in the U.S. (Rex Walters, Wataru Misaka, and Raymond Townsend – h/t Scott Kurashige), Zirin’s analysis points to the larger ways that race operates in this context. 

Lin’s appeal comes because he defies people’s expectations about Asian Americans because he is excelling and playing in a way that people expect from and authentically associate with black players. Zirin goes further to argue, “Instead, we have Jeremy Lin threading no-look passes, throwing down dunks and, in the most respected mark of toughness, taking contact and finishing baskets.” With this analysis we see how race not only defines Lin, but the NBA as a cultural space.  His power rests with his ability to “become” black within the national imagination as baller, yet remain outside the prison/prism of the black-white binary.  Or as Oliver Wang notes, the fanfare illustrates how “hegemonic masculinity is constructed whereupon whiteness hides behind a cloak of black desire.” 

Lin is therefore not breaking down stereotypes (maybe denting them), but in many ways re-inscribing them.  Celebrated as “intelligent” and as “a hustler,” his success has been attributed his intelligence, his basketball IQ, and even his religious faith.  His athleticism and the hours spent on the court are erased from the discussion.  Moreover, in positioning him as the aberration, as someone worthy of celebration, the dominant media frame reinforces the longstanding stereotypes of Asians as unathletic nerds.Likewise, the juxtaposition of his identity, body, and basketball skills to the NBA’s black bodies simultaneously reinforces the dominant inscriptions of both blackness and Asianness.   While J-Lin brings something new to the table – an Asian American basketball role model;  Knicks’ victories – we must not forget the many things that remain in place.  

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.