School, meet Life.

LATimes Bill Plaschke: Knicks’ Jeremy Lin holds mirror up to America

The true beauty of his story is in awareness of the ugliness that has been found there.

The Daily Beast Andrew Sullivan: Jeremy Lin is not Tim Tebow (and here)

Acknowledging the role of race in Jeremy Lin’s story does not make us racist. It is racist to resent Jeremy Lin’s success because he is Asian. To acknowledge race as the overriding factor in the public’s fascination with Jeremy Lin is simply to speak the truth and deal with the world as it is.

The Nation Dave Zirin: Jeremy Lin and ESPN’s “Accidental” Racism

We’ll leave aside for a moment the substance of this comment: the fact that the United States, in the theater of war, has performed genocidal crimes against people who were called the same epithets as Jeremy Lin. We’ll leave aside the fact that people of Asian descent were interned on US soil or the hate crimes they silently suffer in schoolyards and on street corners that persist with little national outrage or discussion. We’ll leave that aside, and just say that in the wake of his own employer’s accidental slips, Kang should perhaps amend his statement to, “If you don’t understand why racism still infects the Lin story and why there is an urgent need to stand up against it, then you really don’t understand America.”

But the person who summed it up best for me is my friend BJL on fb:

Up until this point, I’ve felt that Jeremy Lin has been an example of being cast aside because of subtle racism in this country: not receiving any athletic scholarships after an excellent high school career, not getting drafted after an excellent college career (especially considering he was playing for Harvard and not a top-tier program), and being portrayed by most of the media as having been simply been overlooked the entire time — all rather than in reality, essentially being disregarded for being an Asian basketball player. But to me, what ESPN has pulled is a blatant, albeit passive aggressive, example of racism.