nice, NBA! Not nice, Ivies!

Although I don't care about sports I do care about discrimination and fair racial representation of Taiwanese brothers like Jeremy Lin:


Lin's high school coach, Peter Diepenbrock, said that people without meaning any harm assume since Lin is Asian that he is not a basketball player. The first time Lin went to a Pro-Am game in Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco, his coach said, someone there informed him: "Sorry, sir, there's no volleyball here tonight. It's basketball."During Lin's college career, fewer than 0.5% of men's Division 1 basketball players were Asian-American.
Lin has regularly heard bigoted jeers at games such as "Wonton soup", "Sweet and sour pork", "Open your eyes!", "Go back to China",<--I've heard that one before. "Orchestra is on the other side of campus", or Chinese gibberish. Lin says this occurred even at most if not all Ivy League gyms. He does not react to it. "I expect it, I'm used to it, it is what it is," says Lin. The heckling came mostly from opposing fans and not as much from players. According to Harvard teammate Oliver McNally, a fellow Ivy League player did once call Lin a "chink".
(Is that surprising?)


In January 2010, Harvard played against Santa Clara University at the Leavey Center, just 15 miles from his hometown of Palo Alto, California. Playing to a capacity crowd that included droves of Asian Americans wanting to see his homecoming, his teammates told him, "It was like Hong Kong."
Lin considers himself a basketball player more than just an Asian American. He understands that there have not been many Asians in the NBA. "Maybe I can help break the stereotype," said Lin. Asian Americans who had played in the NBA prior to the 2010–11 NBA season include Wataru Misaka, Raymond Townsend, Corey Gaines, Rex Walters, and Robert Swift. "[Lin's] carrying the hopes of an entire continent. I only had to carry the hopes of Little Rock, Arkansas. He's accomplished a lot more than I have already," said Derek Fisher, who had won five NBA championships with the Lakers, after his first game against Lin.[45] Lin is setting an example for prospective Asian athletes in America who rarely see Asian-Americans playing on their favorite teams. "I don't look Japanese," Walters said, referring to his mother's ethnicity. "When they see [Lin], it's an Asian-American.

article

hope, diversity, adversity, adversaries, isolation, segregation, expansionist historiography, etc.

hope for the present...


without forgetting the past. Props to Beebe for sharing the cuteness with me~and with this website, and all those in the region involved in the struggle, like my great uncles and great aunts who settled in this beautiful region in a not-so-halcyon-for-minorities-past.


From here:


"...The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project sought to use a 'long civil rights movement' framework to tell Seattle’s civil rights movement history online. From the beginning, we imagined that it would be a history that would range from the 1930s to the 1970s, rooted in the local history of everyday people’s struggles for jobs and freedom. That we conducted our work in Seattle meant that we would also inevitably shine a light on the fact that both racial segregation and movements against it in the U.S. West tend to be issues that go beyond black-white politics, and also include Latino/a, Asian American, and even urban Indian history."

Cecil Taylor

"You really have to struggle, to fight. For example, they want you to accept that Africa has been a dark continent, that there was no civilization. This makes your body die. But then you start to read and you discover how people put history wrong. For me this meant a very important process of learning. Your art becomes your evolution. It tells you that there is something else, another reality: the immaterial. This opens up certain things, and might lead to the fact that the breath of your poetic visions becomes more beautiful.

The exploration of history is a spiritual process, in order to be able to judge one's self."
-Cecil Taylor