During his first hour today, Rush mentioned the reaction of Peter King at Sports illustrated in King's "Monday Morning Quarterback" collection to a paragraph in the magazine's cover story on Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks' point guard who has broken through from obscurity to phenom during the past two weeks. What King wrote is indeed an interesting giveaway of what I believe is a common but unsupportable media perspective, namely that students at and graduates of elite upper-echelon universities like those in the Ivy League are presumptively free of overt racism, because, well, they're all so enlightened.
Uh, no. As Pablo S. Torre reveals in said cover story:
Lin would brush off racist jeers from opposing fans ("Sweet and sour pork!") and Ivy League opponents (he was called "Ch---" on the court) to average 16.4 points, 4.5 assists and 2.4 steals as a senior.
How quaint (and admirable) that Torre chose not to finish the slur word. In the past few days, ESPN's repeated employment of the full word ("Chink") has blasted Torre's attempt at decorum to bits.
Here's King's reaction to what Torre found:
Great job with your cover story in SI this week, Pablo Torre, telling America lots it didn't know about Lin ... Amazing in this day and age that in college, in the Ivy League, for crying out loud, Lin got peppered with slurs like "chink'' and "sweet and sour pork!'' on the road.
Here's part of Rush's excellent take:
So Peter King says we would expect these kind of slurs in Hickville, but not in the Ivy League! Oh, my God, what is happening? He got slurred in the Ivy League? How can that be? (laughing) That's funny to me. The Ivy League! He can't believe that there would be this kind of political incorrectness in the Ivy League. This the kind of stuff that happens, you know, in Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, what have you.
Two supplements:
- It isn't just "political incorrectedness," Rush. It's racism.
- The fact that Lin was the recipient of racist taunts from on-court opponents is especially deplorable. Really, what are these other elitist coaches teaching their players, and why do they seem to condone it?
Rush also made an unfortunately telling point about how ESPN and its disciplined employee and ex-employee could have avoided the fallout: "[N]obody would have blinked an eye if they would have made fun of him for being a Christian and made some headline about how his Christian faith failed him during the game."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
