Linsanity’s Yellow Peril

During the hours before the “chink” references at ESPN, I was convinced that many Asian Americans were willing to overlook Floyd Mayweather, Jason Whitlock, the New York Post’s “Amasian,” and myriad other public indignities in order to experience something so joyous and so spectacularly surprising as Jeremy Lin that even we, the people who are like him, have been conditioned to never have expected it.

Less than a week ago, in trying to explain what Lin means to Asian Americans, I wrote on ESPN.com that his feel-good run in the NBA would be a test of ”an Asian American’s ability to take the bad with the overwhelming good.”

We couldn’t be allowed to have even a fleeting, rapturous moment without the bad-good equation being utterly turned on its head by such a torrent of racially motivated indignation and political-correctness backlash that feels, in some ways, like open season has…