Anthony Federico, the now-fired ESPN editor of the now-infamous Jeremy Lin headline, spoke to the Daily News today about his mistake:
“This had nothing to do with me being cute or punny,” Anthony Federico told the Daily News.
“I’m so sorry that I offended people. I’m so sorry if I offended Jeremy.”
Our own Matt Salesses weighed in on the issue over the weekend:
Racism in this country has long been spoken of in terms of black and white, with occasional mention of Hispanics. Once a week, I attend a seminar at Harvard on “Inequality.” I can’t remember a time when Asians even entered into these presentations, though you would be very hard-pressed to find a single Asian American who hasn’t been a victim of racism (see here). Racism toward Asians has always been more tolerated, if not ignored completely, by academia and by everyday society. Today, if you bring up this headline or hear people talking about it, you might hear an explanation of why it is so offensive that goes something like this: what if ESPN ran the headline “Call a Spade a Spade” after Lebron James had a bad playoff series? But the real tragedy here is that in order to get it through people’s heads that the “Chink” headline is racist, even Asians will be framing it in terms of black and white. This is how it is.
[Via Deadspin]
I think it’s an easy call. It was unintentional on the part of both. The good news is that both guys didn’t even think of chink as anything other than a regular word. Progressives are winning the culture wars. Ridiculous overreaction by ESPN. They’re the real problem. Get your heads out!
When I heard of this I had wondered what the intention was, it could have been racism or it could have been unintentional. Chink in the armor has a long history of meaning weakness so it could go either way. Tough call to make though but on words with multiple meanings it can easily be an oversight and unintentional.