EthnicMajority

(NESN.com) Jeremy Lin is ready to make a name for himself on basketball’s biggest stage. That’s what he’s done at every other level, so why should the NBA be any different?

Lin will get a shot with the Golden State Warriors.

His journey from being unrecruited out of high school to going undrafted to making the Association with his self-proclaimed favorite team would be a great story, regardless. Add the fact that Lin is an Asian who graduated from Harvard, and it becomes something a little bigger.

His last name, Lin, tells us that he is of Asian descent. His first name, more importantly, tells us that he is not just Asian, but Asian-American. Asians in the NBA, though few in number, are nothing new. We all know about Houston Rockets center Yao Ming. There’s also Yi Jianlian, the sixth pick in the 2007 NBA draft, now with the Washington Wizards. And Sun Yue was drafted in ‘07 by the Lakers. However, what these players all have in common is that they are from China. They were born in China, played in China and then came to the NBA.

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(OpEd News) On July 13th, citizens from Chicago piled into a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) public hearing on the Comcast-NBC Universal merger to weigh in on the merger and give public comments that would become part of the FCC’s legal record for and against the merger. The legal record would be referred to when making a decision on whether to allow Comcast to merge with NBC or not.

The hearing was held at Thorne Auditorium on Northwestern University’s campus in Chicago. It was possibly the only public hearing the FCC will be holding on this merger in the country.

Each person in attendance had an opportunity to sign up and give two minutes of public testimony. About ninety people signed up. Most were from Chicago but some were from California and other parts of the country.

Those giving public testimony voiced their opinion on a media consolidation move that would put production and distribution into the hands of one company. This would make it a vertical merger. The merger would also mean that Comcast would control one in every five television viewing hours and could potentially push its competitors in the industry to raise prices on cable subscribers by charging them more for NBC content.

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(OpEd News) Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL) put together a hearing on the possible merger of Comcast and NBC Universal on July 8th, which was held in Chicago at the Everett Dirksen Federal Building (the same building holding the US v. Blagojevich proceedings). The hearing, held by the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet (a subcommittee of the Committee on Energy & Commerce in the House of Representatives), invited “witnesses” to testify and provide insight into who might benefit from the merge if it went through.

The hearing held was not open to public comments. However, Rep. Rush, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN) asked questions of all the invited witnesses after an hour of opening statements.

The witnesses present included: Samuel R. DeSimone, Jr., General Counsel, Earthlink, Inc; Will Griffin, President and Chief Executive Officer, Hip Hop on Demand, Jonathan Jackson, National Spokesman, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, Inc.; Paula Madison, Executive Vice President, Chief Diversity Officer, NBC Universal; Joseph W. Waz, Jr., Senior Vice President, External Affairs and Public Policy Counsel, Comcast Corporation. (Ms. Shirley Franklin, Senior Adviser for the Alliance for Digital Equality was invited but did not attend the hearing).

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(Boston.com) All in all, it was a week that M. Night Shyamalan would probably just as soon forget.

Movie critics delivered a withering verdict on his new film, “The Last Airbender,’’ heaping words like “laughable,’’ “flat,’’ and “fiasco’’ on the director’s latest effort to deliver on the promise he showed with 1999’s “The Sixth Sense.’’ But even before the reviews came in, Shyamalan was on the defensive, caught in the crossfire of a debate over ethnicity and authenticity that has implications beyond the fate of any individual movie.

At issue was Shyamalan’s decision to cast three of the four principal roles in “The Last Airbender’’ with Caucasian actors, even though the anime-style TV series that inspired the film featured lead characters who appeared to be East Asian or Native American. Furious at what they saw as the latest entry in an ignoble Hollywood tradition of “whitewashing,’’ or casting white performers in roles that cried out for minority actors, Asian-American activists launched a boycott of “The Last Airbender,’’ staged demonstrations, and mobilized opposition on Facebook.

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(Los Angeles Times) Civil rights activists are strongly condemning actor and director Mel Gibson’s alleged use of the N-word during a recorded argument with the mother of his child publicized by two tabloid media websites.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Institute, is calling for a boycott of Gibson’s movies while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference California said that Gibson has shown a pattern of racism and sexism in prior remarks.

Rev. Eric P. Lee, president of the California branch of SCLC, said Gibson’s statements are sexist and racist.

Gibson has shown “patterns of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, because this is not the first time he has been publicly heard making extremely offensive comments about other races, and now about women,” Lee said.

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(Los Angeles Times) Comcast Corp. said it would add a Latino to its board of directors after it closes on its deal to take control of NBC Universal.

The move is part of an effort by Comcast and NBC Universal to ease concerns among the Latino community about the possible effects of their proposed merger on media diversity. The two companies also unveiled several other initiatives it hoped would lower the volume on the protests over the deal.

Besides adding a board member within 24 months after the deal is sealed, Comcast and NBC said they would boost the number of Latinos working at both companies as well as carry more independent channels and do more business with Latino-owned vendors. Signing a letter supporting their pledges were several Latino advocacy groups, including the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda and the National Hispanic Media Coalition. The National Hispanic Media Coalition and its chief, Alex Nogales, had been very critical of Comcast since the deal with NBC Universal was announced.

In a blog post on Comcast’s website, Comcast also says the two companies will boost carriage of Telemundo, which NBC owns, as well as create new Telemundo spin-off channels.

Both companies also committed to expanding outreach to Latino students and increasing scholarship and internship opportunities.

Comcast also has an African-American — former Fannie Mae executive Kenneth Bacon — on its board of directors.

(NY Times) That’s what a focus group of a dozen African-American women concluded about the musical “Memphis” last summer when they were asked to assess the show’s tagline, “The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

But after seeing artwork featuring Felicia, the black R&B singer in the show, and after hearing about the turbulent romance between the character and a white D.J., the women in the focus group said the show was much more up their alley.

With that in mind, the producers changed the “Memphis” tagline before opening on Broadway to: “His Vision, Her Voice. The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

The use of focus groups is one of several diversity strategies, aggressive by theater standards, used not only by “Memphis” but also by another new Broadway musical, “Fela!”; the new play “Race”; and the revival of “Fences” — all shows centered on black characters, who are rarely in the forefront of major plays and musicals.

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(The Progressive) The new “Karate Kid” with Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith has supposedly learned from the past, setting out to poke holes in some stereotypes about Asians.

That’s good news for any Asian middle-schooler tormented by the “Wax on, wax off” catchphrase of the original.

The film parodies the idea that all Asians are foreigners (“Dude, I’m from Detroit”) and can grab flies out of the air with chopsticks.

It also preserves some of the positives from the original. The heart-warming, cross-racial coalition is still there, as is the theme of reciprocal redemption, to say nothing of the obligatory training montage.

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(National Journal) During today’s House Judiciary Committee field hearing in Los Angeles on the proposed Comcast-NBC Universal merger, minority critics accused Comcast, the nation’s largest cable television operator, of doing little to promote media diversity. “We find it unacceptable that none of the 250-plus channels that are offered on the Comcast platform are 100 percent African American-owned and widely distributed on their nationwide platform,” complained Stanley Washington, president and CEO of the National Coalition of African American Owned Media, in prepared remarks. The dearth of black-owned channels is particularly disturbing, he said, because Comcast has “millions of African American subscribers that contribute approximately 40 percent, or $15 billion, of Comcast’s annual revenue.”

Alex Nogales, president and CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, echoed the criticism with this claim: “NBC has a relatively fair record with the diversity initiatives I mentioned earlier. Comcast does not.” His group has battled Comcast for years in an effort to convince it to carry more Spanish-language channels in markets with sizable Hispanic populations.

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(Asian Week) Harvard education. NBA skills. Jeremy Lin has both.

Lin, a 6′3”, 200-pound point guard, is training in anticipation of the NBA draft next Thursday, June 24. Lin, a Taiwanese American, would be rare in a league dominated by white and Black players.

“Jeremy loved soccer and basketball even before the age of 5. He would go to all of his older brother’s practices and just do the drills on the sideline by himself. When he was in the fourth grade, we realized that YMCA basketball was no longer challenging for him, so we started looking for higher level basketball leagues,” said Lin’s mother, Shirley.

Lin’s parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. They are both computer engineers. Lin’s father, Gie-Ming, is a huge basketball fan and shared this love with his three sons. When Jeremy began playing Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) basketball, Shirley and Gie-Ming realized that Jeremy had a talent. Even with talent, Shirley doesn’t forget the hard work and effort that her son has put in since he was young in order to one day play in the NBA.

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