An undrafted player from Harvard (not exactly a basketball powerhouse) spends his time as a bench warmer in a struggling NBA team until injuries to several starting players give him a chance to start. He takes the ball and runs with it.. up and down the court, demonstrating great skill, helping his team get on a winning path and drawing fan interest. Over the course of several games, he becomes a star.
Then the inevitable happens: he struggles in a game and his team loses. ESPN, America’s leading sports network, announces “Chink in the Armor” under a picture of the star.
One problem: The player in question, Jeremy Lin, is an American of Chinese ancestry.
ESPN's groan-inducing headline
If you are still not getting the problem, you might not know that the word “chink” can be a derogatory term for a Chinese person or someone (like Lin) of Chinese ancestry.
However, as our friends at The Hindu have noted, the word as used in expression “chink in the armor” means something completely different:
The word ‘chink’ has nothing to do with a ‘Chinaman’. This ‘chink’ is a rather obscure word meaning ‘slit’ or ‘narrow opening’. In the old days, as a form of protection, soldiers used to wear armour. If the armour had a slit, then it became a weak spot, which enemies took advantage of.
In fact, as has been noted elsewhere, the term has been used by ESPN over 3,000 times in reference to players of all ethnicities.
Despite that, ESPN quickly pulled the headline and issued an 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
The network also apologized for an ESPN news anchor’s use of the term when referring to Lin.
The most likely explanation is that it was inadvertently used as a common term, possibly by a young writer who might not have remembered that, while it can be used when talking about a member of any other ethnic group in the world, “chink in the armor” is verboten when talking about someone who is Chinese. Case closed.
Frankly, I would not have bothered posting on this except that various folks are raising a fuss over it.
* * *
I faced a similar problem once here at Asian Correspondent. In November of 2009, I did a post on diplomacy regarding North Korea, China and the United States. To encapsulate the gist of the article, I used the headline “Keep the North Korean tar baby stuck to China“. For those of you not familiar with the term, it refers to an old story in which rabbit is stuck to a doll made of tar and almost eaten by a fox.
The term can also be a racist reference to black people if used in a different context. Well, apparently the editor who chose the picture to go with that post was not familiar with the term because he or she chose to use a picture of President Obama to accompany it. To make matters worse, in the format that we used at the time, the picture of Obama was placed right next to the words “tar baby”.
Needless to say, I was aghast when I checked the post a few hours later. I quickly switched the picture of Obama with one of Kim Jong-il and have chosen my own pictures for most posts since then.
