I wasn’t too surprised to see the headline stating that NBA basketball player Jeremy Lin said he heard worse racist remarks in college when he played for Harvard (from 2006 to 2010) than now, when he plays in the NBA. But I was disheartened to read:
“The worst was at Cornell, when I was being called a c—k,” the Brooklyn Nets point guard said in an interview on his teammate’s podcast, “Outside Shot with Randy Foye.” “That’s when it happened. I don’t know … that game, I ended up playing terrible and getting a couple of charges and doing real out-of-character stuff. My teammate told my coaches [that] they were calling Jeremy a c—k the whole first half. I didn’t say anything, because when that stuff happens, I kind of just, I go and bottle up — where I go into turtle mode and don’t say anything and just internalize everything.”
Being a Cornell alum and graduating in the early 1990s, I can’t recall ever been called “chink” or any racist incidents against me. Even back then, I felt Cornell was fairly diverse and had around 15% Asian Americans or so. A quick Google search gave me Cornell’s Class of 2019’s demographics:
But college students can still be a bit immature, especially at sporting events and with their taunts, can be kind of classless. Hopefully this incident was more of a one-off rather than a trend. But on any large campus, you’re certainly going to have a few bad apples …
About John
I'm a Taiwanese-American and was born & raised in Western Massachusetts, went to college in upstate New York, worked in Connecticut, went to grad school in North Carolina and then moved out to the Bay Area in 1999 and have been living here ever since - love the weather and almost everything about the area (except the high cost of housing...)
