EthnicMajority

(NBC Sports) Jeremy Lin didn’t play college basketball on a scholarship — Harvard doesn’t offer athletic scholarships.

Lin was a noted high school player — he led Palo Alto High School to the California state championship and won a number of state awards. But Stanford in his own back yard didn’t offer him a scholarship, nor did UCLA, Oregon or any other Pac-12 school. Lin had the grades, SATs and resume to get into Harvard, so he went East.

We now know Lin as the guy who was good enough at Harvard to get a shot at NBA Summer League, where he turned heads and got some shots in the NBA until the perfect storm came together and “Linsanity” hit New York.

But why was that talent not recognized out of high school. Lin was frank in discussing that with Charlie Rose on 60 minutes that aired Sunday night.

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(NBC Bay Area) For a while, he was a great unknown. Now Jeremy Lin is merely great — and the whole experience was caught on camera.

Lin, the Bay Area native and onetime castoff of the Golden State Warriors, catapulted to international acclaim as the NBA's biggest star of Asian descent since Yao Ming. His unlikely rise from Harvard player to bench warmer to the New York Knicks' surprise catalyst last season is documented in "Linsanity," a film which has its Bay Area debut next week at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival.

Evan Jackson Leong had special access to Lin — the filmmaker harassed Lin in his Harvard days to let him do a movie about the basketball player,according to the San Jose Mercury News.

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(SB Nation) Waiting for competition to resume at a regional track meet in Churubusco, Ind., last spring, the 15-year-old didn’t look much different from other teenagers on coach James Reed’s North Miami High School (Ind.) team. The boy was perhaps a year or two younger than the rest. His stocky, athletic build and longish blond hair distinguished him a tad from everybody else, and maybe – just maybe — how he viewed the world was misaligned with theirs, too.

Huddled with teammates between events, the 15-year-old noticed black girls and boys, jeans sagging off their asses, milling around. As if out of nowhere, he blurted out, "I don't really not like black people. But I just don't like black people when they're sagging, when they've got their hat on backwards."

Stunned, Reed grabbed the boy and hustled him a few feet from the pack. "Why'd you say that?" Reed demanded. "Why?"

The 15-year-old stood mute. But what words do speak to ignorance, which is what racist rhetoric is? Reed knew, however, that the boy wasn't the only person in his high school of 500 students — or in his town or any similar place in rural America where the sight of black faces was rare — who embraced such myopic beliefs. In rural schools like North Miami, many teenagers look at sagging jeans as a clownish fad – same, too, with rap music. They find the profanity-laced lyrics of Trinidad James, 2 Chainz and Rick Ross impossible to dissect to their essence because the black rappers focus too much on baby-momma drama, on living the gangsta lifestyle, on making coin:

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(Economic Times) In one of the most high-profile sports signings of the year, NBA's Houston Rockets last week signed Chinese American basketball star Jeremy Lin for $25 million over four years. Part of the reason the Rockets signed Lin, who has starred in only a handful of NBA games until now, was his marketing potential, especially among the Chinese Americans in the Houston area.

Since his departure, the Forbes magazine reported that the share value of Madison Square Garden, the home games venue of Lin's former team New York Knicks, plummeted by more than $93 million.

Lin's meteoric rise earlier this year as the first big league star athlete from the Chinese American community — the largest Asian American group — had become a global media story. Yet, the Harvard graduate is not the first bona fide celebrity from the community.

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(Yahoo Sports) A high-profile high school in one of the wealthiest districts of the San Antonio region finds itself under fire after its fans chanted "USA, USA, USA" following its boys basketball team's regional final victory against a team made up predominantly of Hispanic players.

As reported by KENS5.com, the Alamo Heights (Texas) High boys basketball team's regional title celebrations were marred by the aforementioned "USA" chants, which came from the school's fan section in the school's Littleton Gym.

While San Antonio Independent School District athletics director Gil Garza insisted that Alamo Heights boys basketball coach Andrew Brewer acted quickly to quash the inflammatory chants, the school at which they were directed — San Antonio (Texas) Edison High — filed an official complaint about the incident with the University Interscholastic League, the governing body which oversees Texas public high school extracurricular activities.

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(ESPN) Jeremy Lin isn't just carrying the New York Knicks.

He's carrying the hopes and dreams of legions of fellow Asian Americans. Most have never met Lin but might feel like they know him. They've been starving for someone like him to come around and break the stereotypes of a race that has been dubbed the "model minority."

He's the boy they grew up with, the one who was in the same class as their daughter, who played sports with their son.

Michael Chang can relate. Two-and-a-half decades ago, he was that boy.

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(San Jose Mercury News) They know what it feels like to be overlooked. People, they say, assume they are weak, servile, out of place. So when these Asian-Americans watch Jeremy Lin slash and shoot his way through the NBA's finest, it's almost as if they are on the basketball court with the Palo Alto point guard who has set the zeitgeist on fire.

Asian-Americans have rallied around other athletes — Michael Chang, Hideo Nomo, Yao Ming, Michelle Wie, Ichiro Suzuki. Tiger Woods was embraced for his Thai side. But Lin has a new and different appeal — a homegrown star besting some of the world's greatest athletes in an intensely physical sport. Asian-Americans have done well in America in many areas, but not this one.

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(Huffington Post) Though ESPN apologized for referring to Jeremy Lin as "Chink in the Armor" Friday night, an Asian-American civil rights organization isn't satisfied with the response.

ESPN changed the headline, and apologized, but the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, an organization that promotes civil rights for Asian Americans, wants the network to do even more.

In a statement posted its site, the AALDEF said that the term used was "inexcusable" and wants ESPN to apologize on air so that "it is clear to all viewers that this racist language is unacceptable."

The AALDEF offered to meet with the network to help educate its staff and establish procedures to prevent such slurs from appearing in their work.

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(USAToday) Point guard Jeremy Lin has become a sensation not just in New York. He posted his first double-double in his two-year career in a 107-93 victory against the Washington Wizards on Wednesday. He's been the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in his three starts with the New York Knicks. In China on Monday, Lin's name was among the top 10 search terms on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, according to Salon.com.

Asian Americans of all stripes are energized by Lin, the first Asian-American player in the NBA:

"I don't care about the outcome. I just want to see him in action. He's as good of an Asian American athlete as there is."

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(FoxNews) At least a dozen female basketball players at a western New York high school were serving suspension for chanting a racial slur as part of their warmup routine, the Buffalo News reported.

The team at Kenmore East High School, near Buffalo, apparently had chanted "One, two, three [N-word]!" for years, to the ignorance of their coaches and school administrators.

The officials only learned of the practice after the current team's sole African-American, sophomore Tyra Batts, was caught brawling with a teammate over the use of the slurs.

While both girls were suspended for fighting, school district officials were called in to deal with the allegations of racism.

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