Jeremy Lin was Discriminated Against Due to His Race - and I Support It

Over the past two weeks, essentially the entire world has been gripped by one Jeremy Lin of the NBA's New York Knicks. As with Tebowmania last fall, more than enough has been written analyzing this astoundingly fast rise to athletic stardom and the attendant cultural phenomena surrounding it. Lin's underdog tale is essentially unprecedented, perhaps matched only by Kurt Warner's ascendancy from grocery bagboy to NFL MVP within the span of two years. To say he's an underdog does not do justice to the absolute shock of what Lin has done, though only the naive could characterize this as merely reflective of athletic prowess. Lin's Harvard pedigree, after being shunned by about every college team in the country, and the media market in which he plays have contributed to the media fervor. His unabashed religious faith, though oddly (wink wink) not a cause for concern as in Tim Tebow, also plays a role in the story.

You've got a sort of perfect storm - literally unbelievable underdog story, Harvard, New York media, social media, legitimately excellent play, and religion coming together. Oh did I forget something? Yes, he's Asian. Only a self-styled iconoclast like Floyld Mayweather has had the cajones to note this most important aspect of the Lin's popularity. Quite simply, we love novelty (and rooting for non-ghetto thugs). There's nothing more novel than an Asian-American NBA player, especially one playing at the level of LeBron and Kobe.

Ironically though, Lin doesn't play "Asian" or "white" at all; he plays rather "black" if one were to characterize his style. Previously I explained how European teams and players could compete with high-flying blacks - they basically don't play the same game. Yet Lin's game is decidedly black, premised on slashing and cutting to the rim, playing loose with the ball in favor of flashy scoring, and lacking precise mechanics in field goal and free throw shooting. Shockingly, Asian Lin excels as a legitimate athlete, his length, quickness, and athleticism actually matching those of his black peers.

So he's an Asian underdog, no doubt about it. But are the two connected? Given the skill level he's exhibited in the past few weeks and his lack of any apparent physical deficiency like being relatively short, one can unequivocally state that Lin was discriminated against due to his Asianness. I don't mean just the admittedly hilarious taunts directed his way at Ivy League basketball games, such as "Open your eyes" and "Do my math homework" (OK, I made the second one up). I mean, through each step of his basketball ascension, Lin has been underestimated due to his Asianness. He got no major college interest, didn't get drafted, got cut by two NBA teams within a year, went back and forth four times to the minor leagues, and sat behind three point guards on the Knicks alone.

Justin, blogging at The Truth Shall Set You Free, notes:

Some people are comparing Jeremy Lin to Tim Tebow. The real comparison is Peyton Hillis.

A guy of the wrong skin color who was ignored until a pile of injuries and coaching desperation led to him getting a shot, who then demonstrates he is one of the best in the business.

Yes, it does explode the lie, in a big and non-ignorable way, that professional sports is some kind of pure meritocracy. Most of all, it deconstructs the idea that pro sports talent evaluators, including coaches, are any good at their jobs. And, yes, racial stereotyping plays a big part in that disability.

I had originally wrote much of this post in responding to Paul Kersey's prodigious writings on SEC football and race, but Justin shares Kersey's perspective:

For every guy like Jeremy Lin or Peyton Hillis, there are scores of other athletes who never got their shot.

I agree that sports stereotyping and discrimination exist, primarily against white athletes in basketball and football positions like wide receiver and running back. Coaches will disregard a white (or Asian) player merely on the basis of his skin color, preferring the "fast" black athlete to the less flashy, but perhaps equally successful, white player.

Justin, Kersey, and those at sites like Caste Football seem to perceive race-based sports discrimination as a negative. While I agree that many white athletes never get their shot, I wholly support race-based sports discrimination in favor of blacks. Why? Because it shows that HBD is alive and well. It shows that stereotyping exists in a must-win field. It shows that coaches, talent evaluators, and general managers have accepted the existence of race-skewed aptitudes, viewing whites as cerebral and blacks as physically gifted (with Asians sticking to math and karate). Unlike the pointy-headed intellectuals in education and government, sports people believe in HBD and will put their livelihood on the line as collateral for that view.

With the often evident differences in physical proclivity out there for all to see, sports still represent the best means of propagating a race realist worldview. The insular whites of SWPLdom have the realities of race shoved right in front of their faces every time they watch the 100m dash, the NBA finals, or Olympic swimming. The sports domination of blacks, perhaps slightly amplified by discrimination against white athletes, is the most obvious and maybe only currently socially acceptable proof of HBD.

One supposes then that the realities of racial physical differences can inform other aspects of society or at least allow HBD to gestate while social mores and genetic science progress. And what do we lose - a few white athletes don't advance in sports? Unfortunate, but I'll take saving the country from demographic ruin over that. If stereotypes can exist so openly in one central institution of society, then perhaps stereotypes haven't really died at the hands of post 60's progressivism.

Editor Note: I tried to be neutral in the above post, but I don't want to actually give a negative impression. I actually love Lin's underdog story; it's fantastic, like a real-life Rocky. And he seems like a nice kid, so bravo for him. But let me also add that there's nothing more pathetic than someone over the age of 16 revering a professional athlete, such as holding up signs at games, carrying cutouts of the player's face, or wearing some self-made shirt extolling the given athlete. "Lin-sanity" has motivated a dishearteningly high amount of this behavior.