One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers on Jeremy Lin and race :
But why can’t we admit that the fascination with Lin and the reason people are following his story is, almost entirely, a result of his race? Black men can run faster and jump higher than white men, asian men, hispanic men, etc.
Part of what makes Jeremy Lin exceptional is his race. If the NBA was filled with Chinese-Americans, this would be a far smaller story. It would also be a far smaller story if Jeremy Lin was a black player from Harvard. We expect black players to excel because experience has taught us that they do excel in the NBA.
I don’t know if this reader is a serious basketball fan like myself, but he sure doesn’t sound like it for a couple reasons.
(1) Good basketball players require a certain level of athleticism, but that’s not ultimately what separates them from the pack of potential draftees. Just ask the Celtics, who have been trying to get more athletic for twenty years, only to end up with Jerome Moiso, Kedrick Brown, Gerald Green, and other incredible athletes who were terrible, worthless NBA players. The idea that serious NBA observers think any one racial group is inherently too unathletic to include potentially great basketball players is, frankly, insulting to the game of basketball.
(2) Jeremy Lin being a great, successful player has nothing to do with him being as athletically gifted as LeBron, or even his new teammate JR Smith, and everything to do with often understated qualities of athleticism that impact the game. Lin’s balance, vision, strength (for his size), and well as his extremely quick first step are all athletic qualities scouts struggle to accurately measure. This happens in other sports; Victor Cruz and Wes Welker are two exceptional wide receivers who change speeds and direction really well and are simply good at getting open.
There are plenty of black basketball players who are overlooked because they too have these strengths (as opposed to raw speed, height, length, or jumping ability), and when they succeed, serious NBA fans are usually excited. In fact, you see this all the time with undersized, non-prototypical power forwards like David West, Paul Milsap, DeJuan Blair, Jared Dudley, Ryan Gomes, and — before he went insane — Glen Davis. But it also happens with guards; Gilbert Arenas, Michael Redd, Mo Williams and others played at bigger programs than Lin, are all black, and were all second round, non-guaranteed picks no one had pegged for stardom.
(3) “We expect black players to excel because experience has taught us that they do excel in the NBA.” This is a ridiculous statement; what we really expect is for the NBA to have a lot of black players, because experience has shown us that it always does. Assuming that black players will actually excel in the NBA, given the league’s demographics, is to assume that 75% of the league will excel, which is patently absurd. The majority of good NBA players are black. The majority of the guys who suck in the NBA are… wait for it… black.
Mostly though, I’m annoyed that people insist on projecting their reasons for caring about someone or something onto everyone else, and demanding that we “admit” this is how everyone thinks. In reality, Lin is getting attention from the sports world largely because he was undrafted, he plays in New York, and he’s killing it on the floor at a level that is literally unheard of in the history of professional basketball (at least for someone’s first couple of games). He’s getting attention from people who don’t care about basketball largely because he’s Asian, and also because he plays in New York.
