Of the many questions that have been asked about the jaw-dropping success

Of the many questions that have been asked about the jaw-dropping success of the New York Knicks’ Jeremy Lin, who went from a barely known basketball player to one of the most famous athletes in America in a single game, one that has yet to be posed is: what is the connection between Lin and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s? While that aesthetically beautiful but morally bankrupt film is primarily remembered for Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy wardrobe, it is Rooney’s turn as the speech-impaired upstairs neighbour, Mr Yunioshi, that, for me, really gives the movie its true flavour. It’s hard to call a film glamorous when it features a white actor playing an Asian stereotype that would put a Tintin cartoon to shame.

Which brings us back to Lin. Lin is an Asian-American NBA basketball player, a first-generation son of Taiwanese immigrants and a Harvard graduate, the American dream given athletic form. Until 4 February, few even knew his name, but after that evening’s game against the New Jersey Nets, in which he scored 25 points, and his continuing near-superhuman run of form ever since, the whole of New York and the American press entered into a state of “Linsanity” to the point that Lin is trying to trademark the coinage.

There have been high-profile Asian-American athletes before, Michelle Kwan and Tiger Woods being the most obvious. There have also been Asian players in the NBA before, such as the now-retired 7ft 6in Yao Ming. But Lin is the first American in the league of Chinese or Taiwanese descent and this, it turns out, has been a difficult concept for some to grasp.

One shouldn’t expect thoughtful sensitivity from professional athletes or the most hysterical wing of the sports media, but the racist language and even flat-out racism directed at Lin has been quite something to behold.

“Chink in the armor” was ESPN’s take not once but twice when the Knicks lost a game last week, both as a headline added by ESPN writer Anthony Federico and then as a phrase used by the anchor Max Bretos (Federico has since been fired and Bretos received a 30-day suspension.) Those two muppets look the height of sophisticated decorum compared with Foxsports.com writer Jason Whitlock, whose response to Lin’s triumph over the Lakers on Friday night was to tweet “Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight”, a comment notable for being almost more misogynistic than racist. When the Madison Square Garden Network flashed up a photo of Lin, it superimposed it with a fortune cookie, presumably refraining from adding some chopsticks purely because it didn’t have the graphics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/21/jeremy-lin-racism-asian-americans