Jeremy Lin signed with the Brooklyn Nets this summer in free agency, taking him back to where Linsanity all began. Although he feels as though his emergence for the New York Knicks wouldn’t have been a headline-grabbing story if he wasn’t Asian-American.
At the Nets’ media day, the 28-year-old point guard spoke about the phenomenon that surrounded him during the 2011-2012 season and suggested that there were racial implications involved, as per Peter Botte of New York Daily News:
“You can just take the racial element alone. You can add on so many other factors, but really anything I do is hyper-magnified in a good way or a bad way,” he said. “People are quick to discount me or say certain things because of my race. And when I do well, people are quick to say he's so amazing, he's the truth, whatever, because of my race, because of the way I look.
In some ways, Linsanity wouldn't have been Linsanity if I was a different skin color, most likely, it wouldn't have been as big of a deal, and that went to my advantage, too, but if you look prior to that, a lot of the obstacles to even get to that point where I could get to a position of getting on the floor, those were definitely obstacles that were very much stereotypes that I had to fight along the way. So I've always understood that there's good and there's bad and you have to take them together and just be thankful for it all.”
Lin certainly overcame a variety of obstacles to establish himself as a regular in an NBA rotation and for a few months in 2012, he electrified arenas in a way that has only been seen a handful of times in this league.
The former Harvard student may have had to break down boundaries to reach where he is now, but he also inspired many basketball fans and players of Asian descent all over the planet.
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