This is outrageous.
(via)
Open thread, if you like.
UPDATE: Looks like I’m late on this story. Here’s ESPN’s apology:
Last night, ESPN.com’s mobile web site posted an offensive headline referencing Jeremy Lin at 2:30 am ET. The headline was removed at 3:05 am ET. We are conducting a complete review of our cross-platform editorial procedures and are determining appropriate disciplinary action to ensure this does not happen again. We regret and apologize for this mistake.
Um, yeah — you’re going to need to do better than that, ESPN. “Conducting a complete review of our cross-platform editorial procedures.” What the what? What does that even mean? How about “the use of the term ‘chink’ was racist and offensive,” or “we apologize to Mr. Lin and to the Asian-American community for use of an ignorant and racist term steeped in historical racism against Asian-Americans, racism that is rarely if every discussed” or “Wow. We’re assholes. Can you believe we thought that referencing an Asian-American as “chink” was a good idea?”
And then maybe talk about what proactive steps you are taking to ensure that this doesn’t happen again and that the persons responsible are held accountable. Babbling about “cross-platform editorial whosywhatsits” isn’t going to cut it.
Hell, at least pretend you’re going to make your editorial department take a diversity seminar. Fail.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
D’you think they really meant it?
amk
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: Yes. They could have gone with any no. of titles. Some hack probably thought he/she was being cute.
Yutsano
Wow that is weapons-grade idiotic.
ABL 2.0
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: yes. someone thought s/he was being punny.
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: It is too stupid to be intentional. At least, that is what I keep telling myself.
Downpuppy
“Last night, ESPN.com’s mobile web site posted an offensive headline referencing Jeremy Lin at 2:30 a.m. (ET). The headline was removed at 3:05 a.m. We are conducting a complete review of our cross-platform editorial procedures and are determining appropriate disciplinary action to ensure this does not happen again. We regret and apologize for this mistake.”
Heads will roll, though maybe not in a Joe Bob Briggs way.
Felinious Wench
Wow.
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: I get the whole never attribute to malice what you can to stupidity thing, but that had to pass through several hands before getting posted. Even for ESPN that’s a huge lack of brain power or common sense.
Trabb's Boy
This kind of thing just kills me, because in a giant organization like that, it’s not as if one racist bastard made an error. There were several people who saw that and didn’t stop it. If there weren’t, that says something pretty bad too.
Omnes Omnibus
@Downpuppy: I guess that answers the question.
@Yutsano: Malice, it is then.
SiubhanDuinne
This is up now:
They’re not exactly apologizing to Jeremy Lin directly — which I agree they must — but I have to be glad they caught it and took it down pretty fast. Not that it should ever have gone up in the first place, of course.
Fwiffo
@Yutsano:
I’d agree with that if it was printed, but on an online site, it could easily be just one idiot.
Amir Khalid
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: Either ESPN did mean it and were racist, or they let it slip and were grossly careless. So they were at fault for this, and the only question is what kind of fault. The apology, if one does come out, should tell us something.
Suffern ACE
Im guessing that at 230 am the headline did not pass before too many editorial eyes, but will now.
Villago Delenda Est
The only apology that Lin should entertain in this case is a Captain Needa apology.
ThresherK
Eww. There is, at most, a very small subset of fictional characters from who this would be humorous.
When something straight-up can pass for The Onion SportsDome, yuck.
GregB
Did ESPN hire the white rappers who performed at CPAC?
Whoever did that is an asshole and a racist. No two ways around it.
Brachiator
@Omnes Omnibus:
Apparently, it happened twice, in a headline and commentary. As noted in a Forbes blog post:
The post goes on to note that ESPN has a history of “edgy” headlines that they end up apologizing for.
Yutsano
@Fwiffo: I think this will be true in the sense that there will be a scapegoat. Some lowly coder will get canned and ESPN will flail about high standards and other various bullshit. And the world will move on.
My hope is Jeremy Lin is smart enough to twist the knife during every future interview with them.
Villago Delenda Est
It’s interesting, but WoW’s chat filter would have caught that. You try to talk about a “chink in the armor” in a totally appropriate way, and “chink” simply goes away.
This was pretty deliberate. Someone thought they were being punny, as mentioned above.
Tyro
Making a clever play on words is exactly what gets headline writers excited. If they don’t have a “racist implication filter” in their brains, then not only does this headline get through, the writer gets self-satisfied about his own cleverness in coming up with it.
Shawn in ShowMe
Rupert Murdoch owns ESPN now? That’s a Fox headline if I’ve ever seen one — a wording that was clearly intended to be provocative, that was approved by the editorial staff, but if you point to it out, you’re the one who’s deemed racist.
And so the take-down of a MSM-spawned sensation begins. I hope Mr. Lin was prepared for this betrayal. Based on what we’ve read about him, he appears to be intelligent and a good judge of character.
WereBear
I’m so used to “warfare metaphors” in sports headlines that I had to look twice at it to see what the fuss was about.
Amir Khalid
@SiubhanDuinne:
Agreed: ESPN does still owe Jeremy Lin a personal apology. I guess that attributing the offensive headline to the “mobile web site” rather than to an individual, pending the outcome of an internal inquiry, could be justified as not wanting to prejudice the outcome of the inquiry. But the apology lacks a statement that racist (or racist-seeming) remarks are against ESPN’s corporate values, and seems halfhearted.
sloan
WTF? Bill Maher had a bit last night mocking the fact that the media had run out of almost-racist Jeremy Lin puns. Guess he was wrong.
kth
Presumably the editor who wrote the headline was high at the time.
FridayNext
@GregB:
No, they hired those two racist chicks from Gainesville who can’t safely return to school. I hear they have time on their hands.
Brachiator
@Tyro:
They missed the “clever” part.
Joe L.
Is there no limit to the stupid???
salacious crumb
ABL, before you start bleating about what ESPN did, which was was offensive, how about condemning Kobe’s condescending attitude towards Lin, or that black Fox reporter saying some woman in NY was gonna feel a couple inches of pain or Floyd Mayweather complaining that Lin is getting attention only because of his race?
why did you come back? no other blog willing to host your thinly sourced innuendoes anymore?
Hill Dweller
During the Knicks/Lakers broadcast, ESPN showed a fan holding up a sign calling Lin “The Yellow Mamba”(a play on Kobe’s nickname). So the director saw that sign before the audience, knew it was ignorant/insensitive, but still cut to the shot anyway.
Villago Delenda Est
@salacious crumb:
Where’s R2? We need that electron probe of his here in this thread, stat!
maya
@Shawn in ShowMe:
Probably not. If he did the headline would now read: “Ch*nk in the armor”(D)
Soonergrunt
NO.
Amir Khalid
@salacious crumb:
Tsk, tsk. Just couldn’t resist getting your ABL hate on could you? You know what? Attacking a front-pager’s post for being about this thing, rather than that thing (which you have decreed is more important, only you didn’t tell anyone until you saw the post), is always silly and petulant.
Billy Beane
It’s great that I can always count on ABL v2.0.1 to find any hint of racism anywhere no matter how insignificant such as something posted at 2am and removed at 3am. Boy, bet a lot of people noticed that.
It’s not like there are more important things going on. No, with ABL 2.0.01-125 it’s all racism all the time.
Brachiator
@salacious crumb:
If this other stuff bothers you, why don’t you condemn it?
CaseyL
I don’t watch basketball, and I don’t watch TV sports, so the whole Jeremy Lin thing has sorta passed me by. I didn’t know he was personally religious until someone posted a thing about how Lin’s religiousness contrasts to Tebow’s ostentatious religiosity. And because I never paid any attention to the photos or clips, I didn’t even know the kid was Asian until very recently. (“Lin” could be anything… Irish, even.)
I note this only because it is a very strange feeling to be so thoroughly out of the Zeitgeist loop of the moment.
Also want to note that just because Murdoch owns ESPN doesn’t mean he’s the reason they made such a dumb flub. Organized, mega-commercial mega-capitalized team sports is not an area in which one should expect to see high levels of moral-ethical awareness ever, in any venue. In fact, “A chink in the armor” does indeed qualify as a rapier-witted bon mot in the hur-de-hur universe of sports commentary.
Another reminder to Seattle BJers: Meet-up tonight, 6:00, at the Sazerac downtown.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Yutsano:
Perhaps not. Because of personnel cutbacks, these operations have surprisingly few layers, particularly on the web side, to go thru before going public. I’ve read accounts from several sports reporters and columnists saying that editorial “standards” have very much slackened over the last ten years because their industry in dying.
Cry me a fucking river on that aspect of it but we are seeing more “sloppy editorialness” now than I ever recall seeing.
Still no excuse for it. Believe me, it’s one thing to have a poorly written headline “get thru” as opposed to one with an obvious racist slur “get thru”
jacy
@Tyro:
I think you’ve hit it. Back when I was editor of my college newspaper (Branding Iron – University of Wyoming Represent!) we couldn’t wait to print some poor bastard’s picture under the headline: WAC Off. Player of the Week!
That was after we stole the opposing team’s mascot (a ram) and shaved rude things on it’s side. Of course we did have the excuse that we were young, stupid, and drank a hell of a lot.
The Dangerman
One or more idiots is hitting the unemployment line today.
Amir Khalid
I was under the impression that Disney owned ESPN.
Brachiator
@Billy Beane:
Hmmm. Let’s see. Forbes noticed it and wrote about it. There has been reaction all over the web. ESPN even apologized for it.
I presume that in your little bird brain corner of the universe, they were waiting for ABL to call before they apologized, because she is the only person in the entire universe who might notice something like this.
wrb
Well, I completely missed the racial double meaning. I could easily have written and posted that headline in innoscence.
When I read it here I figured that the problem upsetting people was blaming one guy for a loss when it is a team sport.
Trentrunner
ESPN has always been niggardly with their apologies.
WyldPirate
Sigh. Another day of ABL and BJ outrage turned up to eleventy. At least you didn’t subject us to all caps and bold in your snit.
Reading is fundamental as well. What part of “offensive” and “We regret and apologize for our mistake” did you not understand? Or was there not enough self-flagellation and sack-cloth and ashes in the statement? Perhaps a public hanging or beheading of an intern or some other low-paid young whippersnapper who likely wrote the heading around midnight or later while the big wigs running departments were at games or enjoying sleep or time with family or hookers and blow would suffice.
Meanwhile John Cole can call Christie a “triple chinned asshole” and nary a peep about insensitivity towards overweight folks from the BJ PC police. Why? It was directed at “the enemy”.
ESPN fucked up and apologized. But there are a lot of folks here that chunk rocks through their goddamned glass houses every day and many are usually the first to pile on when things like this happens to someone or some group that they perceive to be the wrong target.
Murakami
I’m sure its just me and I’m sure I’m probably just a deaf, dumb, blind kid who’s horrible at pinball, but it actually took me a minute to see what the complaint was all about. My first thought was: “Lin had fewer than 9 turnovers and ESPN misreported out of an anti-Lin bias?”
I tend to think people are better than they actually are so I will assume the headline writer simply wasn’t thinking things through. “Chink in the armor” is a very common cliche and because that cliche occupies a completely different part of the brain from the use of the word ‘chink’ as a racial insult, I could see this being a mistake. Especially since the word chink, as an insult, probably doesn’t come to mind for most people under 60, at least not as an un-ironic silly word.
Kinda like the (white) Washington DC mayor’s aide who had to resign after using the word “niggardly” in front of a predominantly black audience. He was thinking of the word purely in financial terms and forgot what that word would sound like to his audience.
kc
Maybe that statement is corporate-speak for “We’re gonna find out who did that and fire their ass.”
Hey, we can hope ….
WyldPirate
@Brachiator:
Dude or dudette is just pointing out the moat in ABLs eye.
wrb
@ 47: innocence
funny how WP changes your name to “undefined” when you attemt to edit late but doesn’t accept the edit.
I’m afraid “chink in the armor” was too typical a military metaphor, and too common, for me to think twice about and the racial use of “chink” too uncommon for it to occur to me.
Billy Beane
@Brachiator: So media pointing at shit and saying, hey look at this screen capture of something that existed on the internet between 2am and 3am. Isn’t this outrageous. Come, look. Be outraged. Post link backs about it. While here please click on our ads.
So that makes it more significant? The fact the media and people like ABL want it to be?!
When PT Barnum said there is a sucker born every minute he was talking about people like you.
Wordsmith
Okay – not watching sports (unless it involves my nephews or granddaughter), I had no idea who Jeremy Lin was until my twitter feed made up of primarily politicos, etc., exploded. I certainly had no idea of his ethnicity until reading up on him & seeing his sweet face in some picture. I, of course, when at first read, read the word as ‘chink’ meaning a break or fissure having read the Knicks had lost their game. Later it struck me. I’m not a person of color so words, actions, people looking at me strangely, and other subtle or absolutely overt behavior doesn’t strike me the same as it would against those or whom it is specifically directed. It doesn’t mean I lack awareness or lack empathy or sensitivity.
And I’m trying to figure out to express this adequately.
My guess: Whoever wrote that headline KNEW what they were writing. Especially given their involvement in sports [male-dominated sports I might add] would be very much aware of Lin’s heritage and the derogatory meaning behind ‘chink,’ If they didn’t – which I really do find questionable – then their logic for being this stupid is as suspect as those Marines who posed with the SS (Wehrmacht) flag in Afghanistan.
I don’t think firing is the answer. I think a good, long class in diversity training is the trick.
Chyron HR
@WyldPirate:
Yes, yes, ABL is terrible. It’s no wonder you occasionally feel compelled to refer to her as a “crack ho”.
Because that’s what true progressives do, you know. They casually refer to African-American women as “crack hos”.
(And complain about the “PC police” also, too.)
WyldPirate
@Murakami:
It’s not just you. Could have been as you described. Could have been a smartass thinking he made a funny with a sly double entendre.
Jamey
This was a QC issue. I don’t think that ESPN as an institution is racist. They just trusted some frat-boy douche to pull the levers on the Lobster shift. Then again, maybe Murakami is right and there is an innocent explanation.
Buuuuut, it happened on ESPN’s site, so they deserve all the heat they get.
Jamey
@WyldPirate: @WyldPirate: Sigh.
So why do you come here if you find this site so offensive?
SiubhanDuinne
@WyldPirate:
Any alligators in that moat?
Brachiator
@WyldPirate:
Actually, no. It’s just more faux poutage by small pe nis idjits who get a weak hard on from bashing ABL.
Consider. ABL condemns a racist jibe directed toward Jeremy Lin, and a nutcases accuse her of only caring about racism directed toward blacks. Or something. Or anything. And as I pointed out, a number of sites, including Forbes, also condemned this. But somehow, it’s only about ABL.
@Billy Beane:
It’s a 24/7 world. I guess you think you have a point. You don’t.
Billy Beane
@efgoldman: Here is the really funny part. A lot of these stories are now written by software algorithms. Especially stuff on weekends and late at night. Not saying this one was. But it would be hilarious if all you suckers were actually arguing with a computer calling it a racist.
Reminds me of that guy who wrote software to automatically argue with conservatives on twitter. Turns out it’s not that hard to do.
Seem appropriate that people who fall for this bait every time get tooled in the process.
Frankensteinbeck
I am heavily in the ‘do not ascribe to malice’ camp, but it’s very difficult to me to imagine a professional headline writer not seeing this as a racist pun. I guess it’s possible.
The apology is annoyingly weak sauce, but there I don’t think it’s intended to be. Corporations just love bland, official sounding text and have ever since they learned the word ‘synergy’. If anything, they love it more when the topic has already created offense.
patrick II
Open Thread topic.
In the about fckin’ time department:
From the Washington Post:
Keith G
My sense is that he is tonnes smarter than anyone reading this thread. He most likely will act with professionalism and a notable lack of outrage.
WyldPirate
@Chyron HR:
Kindly point me to where I ever referred to ABL as a “crack ho” even once, much less multiple occasions. Good luck finding it.
I may have used “attention whore”, “outrage monger”, “full of shit” and I have used liar in reference to her. I think all of these things are true along with her being by far the worst and most biased frontpager on BJ. It’s an opinion and just like assholes, we all have them. Some here agree with my opinion of her and some don’t.
Billy Beane
@patrick II: lol….from the what rock have you been under department. This is nothing new.
Billy Beane
For those who do not believe me that a lot of these stories are written by software. Here is an entire page of these stories. Not bad for a computer huh?!
http://blogs.forbes.com/narrativescience/
It’s not just business news with hard numbers. It is making its way into other types of news such as sports.
http://www.narrativescience.com/solutions.html
WyldPirate
@Jamey:
I don’t find it offensive. I find the hypocritical horse’s asses here amusing most of the time and tedious at others.
Yutsano
@Billy Beane: Because a computer algorithm absolves ESPN of all responsibility for putting up a racially insensitive remark. No wonder Harper got his majority with hosers like you helping him.
Tone In DC
People who dislike ABL’s posts seem to have a LOT of time on their hands for comments on those posts. Lots of comments.
Makes them seem a bit like… attention whores.
Mnemosyne
As a clueless white person who has said more than her share of clueless shit that she’s had to apologize for, I actually can completely believe that the headline writer posted it without thinking it through, especially on deadline.
But that’s even more reason to smack it down: someone who did it out of cluelessness is more likely to be horrified and embarrassed at their mistake and swear to themselves that they’ll never do it again, because now they feel like an asshole. And they’ll be more likely to read all of their headlines twice in the future.
Also, too, as a corporation, Disney is very, very big on diversity training and racial sensitivity, so this headline writer is in for many hours of training and “coaching” and monitoring if s/he gets to keep his/her job.
WyldPirate
@efgoldman:
Thanks for correcting me on the misuse of the word mote. I’m sure you’ve never done anything like that since you’re such a perfect specimen of a human.
Good to know that you’re such a humble fucker too since you equate yourself and 7-8 posters to the “whole fucking blog”.
Hit the pressure release valve on your head before you rupture your cranium.
greennotGreen
I work at a university which, almost by definition, is multicultural. We had a former colleague (now making the big bucks in industry!) who was Canadian of Chinese heritage. A friend coined the term “Canasian,” and I don’t think anyone thought it was the least bit racist or offensive because it was from a friend to a friend. A former AA boyfriend called our blond roommate “cracker”, but it was okay because it was a kind of brotherly love. (Although we never called him in return the N-word, although I do recall saying, “Are you acting like a big N?”) My point is, among friends, things that might be offensive to a stranger or to the public at large are often not offensive at all, are even endearing.
Therefore, since it is highly likely that a web-writer has worked with people of Asian extraction (may even be of Asian extraction), it’s highly likely a young, knowledgeable-but-lacking-in-wisdom writer typed the “chink in the armor” because it’s what he would have said to his buddy Kai. Doesn’t mean it’s right. It just means I’m voting “no” on malice, “yes” on stupidity.
burnspbesq
@Yutsano:
My hope is that Jeremy doesn’t care. This isn’t worth getting sideways about. It’s just a bad pun based on a common figure of speech. And frankly, Lin does turn it over too much, so as criticism it’s spot-on.
What Floyd Maywether said is worth getting sideways about, but ABL was out to lunch on that one. Curious.
ABL
@burnspbesq: i’m unaware of what floyd maywether said. i’ll google it. it’s been a busy week and i’ve been mostly focused on the contraception business. i saw the screenshot passed around on twitter this morning and my reaction was “wha?!” so i wrote a quick post about it.
ETA: asiangrrlMN’s reaction. so again, just because a racist comment isn’t important enough to you to warrant comment doesn’t mean it’s not important to others. not sure why i have to keep saying that, but there it is. again.
Downpuppy
@greennotGreen: Oddly enough, that’s the same way Spiro Agnew got in trouble with Gene Oishi.
Billy Beane
@Yutsano: I look forward to the day we find out ABL v3.1 finds out she is outraged over something a computer wrote and how that computer should be fired for being a racist!
Good times ahead!
Why even stop there. We need to have a BJ_Hal9000 arguing with Redstate_TerminatorT2000 non stop 24/7 with all the idiots here and there who fall for it every time randomly visting and expressing their outrage over what is being said, and then buying pet calendars.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne:
I would not be surprised one bit if the writer of the headline was a mid 20-something low paid grunt or younger no paid intern who some months earlier was totally geeked out about having a chance to break into the ranks of those who write about sports professionally. The young sports geeks I know are not racist, but they can be quite self-certain and prone to tunnel vision.
I imagine this person maybe very sick with remorse right now at her/his stupid action. Everything they have worked for is circling the drain.
Oh well.
Yutsano
@Billy Beane: Way to beautifully miss the point. I expect no less from a Harper bootlicker.
ruemara
Amazing. Because ABL writes about racism directed at a popular sports star, she is an awful person because she did not deal with the racism a select few found that was also outrageous. Because if it is an ABL thread, that same set of people will find anything at all to deride her about. Not to say that what ESPN, theoretically a sports journalism company, has said is wrong and that they did apologize, but to attack the person writing about it. Well, assholes gotta be assholes, so I leave you to being assholes.
edited to reflect that, I write. Semi-pro, but for the same pub for about 5 years. If I ever, ever sent something like that in, I’d probably have to change it, thanks to a process called editing. If it ever got into print, then we’d both have some serious explaining to do. I could possibly lose my byline. So, fuck that noise about innocent mistake and algorithms writing columns. Fuck it to hell. Lin has had racist statements directed to him from blacks and whites. It’s outrageous and it has to end. Now.
wrb
Now all I can think of are the better incorrect headlines that could be written about Lin using Clouseau’s pet name for Kato.
Gonna offend, you might as well have fun at it.
burnspbesq
@ruemara:
the racism a select few found that was also outrageous.
A select few? Maywether’s statement about Lin was on the front page of espn.com for at least 24 hours.
Citizen_X
@Billy Beane: Really? You’re going to double down on this pulled-out-of-your-ass speculation about, “Hey, maybe a computer wrote their racial slurs!”?
Fine. I’m going to go with, “Maybe ESPN saw that Pete Hoekstra ad and said, “Hey, how ’bout we hire those people!”
ruemara
@burnspbesq: And I don’t read ESPN. I didn’t read this headline either. I see a select few in this thread who find it OUTRAGEOUS that ABL is not dealing with Maywether’s statement along with this headline. See how that works, you read it, you bring it to someone’s attention because you are part of a select few who actually read ESPN. You’re a damn lawyer and I have to do the parsing for you?
Billy Beane
@Yutsano: Your attention to me is duly noted my most loyal of groupies.
Billy Beane
@Citizen_X: As opposed to how a screen capture of something that was posted on the internet between 2am and 3am by god knows what sort of employee hired to do that at that time is worthy of a serious discussion? Even on BJ?!
Rrrrrright.
Hey, how about a story expressing the outrage over the quality of employees McDonalds is hiring for the Midnight to 8am shift at the 24hr drive thru…..lol.
You people are hilarious. That’s why I love coming back here and making fun of you.
burnspbesq
@ABL:
So you went off half-cocked without doing even a minimal amount of research? Imagine my surprise.
Your irrational hatred and intellectual dishonesty define you.
Yutsano
@Billy Beane: Yawn. Your shark, she has been jumped.
WyldPirate
@SiubhanDuinne:
Any alligators in that moat?
Good one! :-)
Sadly no alligators yet in the moat (3 ft deep drainage ditch) in front of my house, either. Plenty of beer cans, trash bags and other BS that I have to regular fish out because of the asshole motorists who think their car window is a lid to the trashcan that is this backwater hellhole I live in.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@ruemara: There is a nasty streak in many people in this country, where Black people are required to apologize for every bad thing another Black person has said, or they’re the Real Racists.
maus
@salacious crumb:
How about you make your own blog where people give a shit about this supposed hypocrisy before you start bleating about ABL?
wrb
@WyldPirate:
Swine moat
dead existentialist
I hope the Knicks when the NBA Championship so that when Lin is asked what he’s going to do next, he replies, “Not going to Disney World.”
ETA: Haha, I’m getting a Disney ad!
Amir Khalid
@Billy Beane:
Had the headline in question been software-generated, rather than written by a human, I doubt ESPN would be promising disciplinary action against any guilty parties. Besides, the headline being software-generated still would still not have gotten ESPN off the hook. Does it let the software publish to the Web without human supervision? That is hardly responsible journalism.
Also, I am disappointed that this thread has become the usual argument over ABL, rather than what she has brought to our attention. I don’t see anything to support salacious crumb’s accusation that she’s willfully ignoring racism by black people, and I don’t agree that she’s making a mountain out of a molehill; after all, ESPN did admit to a preventable mistake. It let a headline using the word “chink”, apparently referring to an athlete of Chinese ethnicity, go out on the Web.
ArchPundit
How can it be that ABL doesn’t jump on every time some black person isn’t properly respectful of the horribly oppressed white minority? It’s the black man’s burden she just doesn’t live up to. It’s so tough being a white man in America.
Fuck me.
These are the same kind of assholes who try to insist the Pekin Chinks wasn’t really racist because the people were who named it were clueless.
Yutsano
@efgoldman: I think we have attempted several times over to give Amir front pager status. He has so far declined. I’d welcome his insight though.
ArchPundit
Then again, ESPN does put Redskins in many headlines so whatever.
Tehanu
@Keith G:
FWIW I think you and Mnemosyne, and Murakami @50 too, have said the most sensible things on the thread. People do make mistakes without being dyed-in-the-wool racists. And yes, ESPN needs to make its general apology more specific about why it’s offensive, and needs to apologize to Lin as well, but the apologies don’t necessarily need to be made instantly. If some of the commenters here think ESPN should have already said everything they think it ought to say, in exactly the terms they want it to use, they’re either expecting it to read minds or they’re using it as an excuse to gin up their own outrage meter.
Nutsack McGee
Thank goodness people are here to tell me this is totally racist. I see this as an honest mistake that was corrected and not some attempt at insulting Lin. Good to know that I’m just a fucking idiot.
Gwangung
Mr. Beane, WyldPirate, you’re major assholes. PLENTY of really pissed Asian Americans about this.
You obviously don’t know any or dont listen to them if you did have any.
Death Panel Truck
@efgoldman:
Seems you’re ignorant as well. It’s “It’s.”
John - A Motley Moose
@burnspbesq: Is this projection?
Cassidy
The same people, back saying the same things. Would be nice if they walked into a moving bus. My pie filter doesn’t exist at work, so that seems to be the best alternative. Go cross the the street wyldbigot…a lot…until you don’t come back.
Soonergrunt
The victim is always the last to know. We, however, knew that before getting halfway through your little spew there.
Gwangung
@Cassidy: Those assholes inks it’s just an antiABL thing. Except they stomped pretty hard on the toes of Asian Americans when they did it.
That makes me think it’s more of a problem they have with group(s) than an individual.
matt
Here’s another epsn win:
From
http://espn.go.com/new-york/nba/story/_/id/7581045/sources-new-york-knicks-jeremy-lin-all-star-weekend-role
Brachiator
@Nutsack McGee:
Odd. ESPN apologized for the offensive remarks. Note that it wasn’t just a posted headline, it was also in spoken remarks by an ESPN reporter.
So, the sports net acknowledged the offensiveness. And apologized. They thought it was more than just a mistake.
This would then make you a fucking idiot.
JMS
What’s fascinating to me is that we didn’t have to “worry” about this until recently because there were no high profile Asian-American athletes to be racially slurred. So, you know, progress of a sort. (I do count Hines Ward as the best half-Korean player in the NFL, but I guess most people don’t) So, one wonders what dormant racial slurs will be exhumed next.
Nutsack McGee
Yes Brachiator, there has never been an apology by any media outlet to appease the people who salivate at the chance to call racism.
Rawk Chawk
@efgoldman:
So…who cares what you want on a comment thread on a blog on the Intertron? Hall monitor needs to fuck off with its bad self and get a real life in meat space.
I enjoy Wyldpirate and wish for it to remain. So, uh…there.
Brutusettu
S@JMS:
“high profile”?
I don’t pay attention to MLB, but a few Japanese players are definitely high profile for followers of MLB.
Patrick Chung just played in the Super Bowl for the Patriots.
Nutsack McGee
And thank you Soonergrunt for letting me know that i am indeed an idiot for thinking a headline that has been used a thousand times before was used to by a rogue ESPN employee to call him a chink. I’m sure everyone at ESPN ( a known white supremist org.) thinks in racial terms 24/7. I can totally see that employee wringing his hands and thinking it was worth his job to take a jab at an Asian American. Grow the fuck up you out of touch prick.
Cassidy
@Rawk Chawk:
Glad to know you side with bigots. This whole pie filter thing gets easier. Are there any Stormfront style arguments you’d like to make before I get off work and add your name?
Cassidy
Wow, the whiny bitch brigade is out in force. Perhaps all of you should join wyld bigot in trying to find something shiny at the bottom of a deep lake.
ABL
@burnspbesq: lolwut? you’re making zero sense.
ABL
my irrational hatred of whom? I’m finding this all very amusing.
(edited because my phone was being wonky.)
gwangung
@Nutsack McGee: Fuck off. You should realize you’re being a first rate idiot.
gwangung
@ABL: Projection, ya know.
Any twit who’d say that this was making a mountain out of a mole hill in front of Asian Americans shows they’re not thinking. At all.
Billy Beane
@Amir Khalid: So when it comes to pointing out the most obscure hint of racism to generate content on an otherwise slow news day, corporations (in this case forbes) are suddenly considered people for pointing it out….lol
Mike S.
good lord,
it was taken down and apologized for in about 30 min. and you’re still pissed off. why? the apology wasn’t good enough…
“at least pretend you’re going to make your editorial department take a diversity seminar”
that’s an absurdist suggestion, such a pretense is in and of itself offensive and socially destructive.
(the ugly truth is better than pretty lies)
clearly the problem at this stage is that ABL 2.0 is a crank, just somebody who isn’t happy unless there’s something to be unhappy about
maus
@Mike S.:
HEH, LIBERALS CAN’T TAKE A JOKE, EH?
maus
@Tehanu:
The issue is that they’re hack writers/thinkers, and internalized racism pops out. They didn’t think it, but they’re perpetuating it.
JadedJourno
Oh my, I’ve been this guy in the past! Let’s set the scene:
I’m a copy editor on our school’s newspaper. We print about 45,000 copies for each of the five days we publish. We are distributed on campus and in the community. It’s around midnight on a weekday, and we’re trying to put the paper to bed.
One of our front page stories fell through, and we have an opening that we’re trying to fill quickly. Our photography editor has some photos from an event the Black Student Union held. It was their annual spades tournament. Great, we’ll run it. The photo package fits with minimal tweaking, and being at a university that is maybe 15% minority, and being a bunch of libruls in training, we like the idea of giving BSU some coverage.
Oh yeah, the photo needs a catchy headline because it’s running as a stand-alone piece (“wild art”). So I write “Fired up about spades,” because the photo is of the guy who won the tournament, and he’s excited. And I’m a white middle-class teen from the suburbs. And my parents, while closed-door racists, aren’t the sort who would use racial epithets openly. My uncles would though, and I’d never heard them call a black person a spade, so it didn’t set off my headline alarm bells. And it didn’t set off alarm bells for any of the other white kids ages 18-22 working in the newsroom that night. And that’s the story of how I wrote a racist headline that was published in a major public university’s student-run newspaper. Sometimes it really is just a bunch of idiots.
Aftermath: I got to sit down with our faculty advisor and staff from the university’s Office of Multicultural Affairs to explain what happened. They quickly realized I was, in fact, just a stupid, naive white kid from the suburbs who had never heard “spade” used as a racial epithet for blacks. I also learned “spook,” which I had always understood to be slang for a spy.
As a bonus, I knew all the people from OMA because I was employed as a computer tech by the administrative department they were attached to. They had some pretty good laughs at my expense.
different-church-lady
@Billy Beane: And why should I believe you’re not a computer algorithm written for the specific purpose of making sane people pound their heads on their desks?
different-church-lady
Here, let me translate that apology for you: “We’ll be firing the unpaid intern we put in charge of writing the headlines as soon as we figure out who that is.”
Pococurante
@maus:
Horsefeathers. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I thought the point of post-Racism is that we didn’t have to furiously censor common speech. That side stepping the bigots is the first step in neutering them.
War metaphors are common in sports common speech because sports is warfare lite.
“C hink” as a racist pejorative is roughly 150 years old. The military use goes back to the mid 15th century.
Get back to me when “The Flintstones” are pulled off the air for having “a gay old time”.
But then what does an old kraut kike like me know. Maybe it is perfectly fine for demagogues of any persuasion to play their blame games.
Maybe that’s why bigotry never really goes away. Everyone does it, everyone is a unconsciously latent bigot that just has to get their kicks.
Some Guy
@Pococurante: We’ll get back to you when we’re “Post-Racism”. Until then, ABL is good enough.
Pococurante
@Some Guy:
I doubt it.
Demagoguery. I was tired of this crap thirty years ago. I made a mistake then. I’ve learned to beware such cynical money grubbing.
Weakness, demagoguery, is easy for most.
And easiest for the simple minded to demand that others demand less of themselves. Childishly, they demand nothing of each other.
Only others.
It’s a game. One the GOP learned watching the 1970s.
ABL is on a trajectory. She is first to demand nothing of those around her than that they be SAFE versions of those she “calls” to account.
Maus
@Pococurante:
Not when the cigar keeps appearing over and over again in the context of Lin.
What’s post-Racism? We’re not past Racism. This IS racism.