Let’s all concede that under normal circumstances, the phrase “chink in the armor” has no racial connotations.
But when a sports journalist writes a headline about a Chinese-American basketball player named Jeremy Lin, some caution is in order.
For you non-basketball fans, Lin plays point guard for the New York Knicks. He was considered a mediocre player, until he went on what is now a 10-game tear of scoring points and dishing out assists. So far, the Knicks have won eight of their last 10 games.
Fans not familiar with the term “flash in the pan” have hopped all over the Lin bandwagon. He’s developed such a devoted following that his adoring legions have been accused of something called “Lin-sanity.”
I must fess up that I’m not one of the Lin-sanity brigade. He is, after all, a Knick. I have nothing against the team, but their fans are the most insufferable in basketball.
If you doubt that, go back 40 years or so. In 1970, the Knicks won the National Basketball Association championship. They won it again three years later in 1973.
You’d be hard-pressed to convince any Knicks fan that those two piddling titles in four seasons don’t make a dynasty that rivals the ones of the Boston Celtics, the Los Angeles Lakers or Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls of the 1990s.
But back to Lin: after he’d led the Knicks to seven straight victories, they lost a game in which Lin committed nine turnovers. That’s when this headline appeared on the ESPN website for about 35 minutes: “Chink in the Armor.”
Honchos at ESPN quickly went into derriere-covering mode. They called the headline “offensive,” and issued a statement saying they were “conducting a complete review of our cross-platform editorial procedures and are determining appropriate disciplinary action to ensure this does not happen again. We regret and apologize for this mistake.”
I hope, when reviewing their “cross-platform editorial procedures” that ESPN execs make it clear that there are instances where the phrase “chink in the armor” is perfectly fine.
Otherwise, we might get what we had here in Washington, 13 years ago. Remember that fiasco? David Howard was white, male and working for the District of Columbia government. His boss was then-Mayor Anthony Williams.
Howard made the mistake of assuming that the people who worked for him had some kind of functioning vocabulary, that they cracked a book — like, oh, say, a dictionary every once in a while.
Oh, how wrong he was.
In a conversation with two black and very cognitively challenged employees, Howard used the word “niggardly.”
“The word does not have any racial connotations,” Howard would explain later after he was forced to resign. “I realize that staff members present were offended by the word. I immediately apologized.”
It was the staffers who should have apologized for their own ignorance. The word “niggardly” indeed does not have any racial connotations. The word means “grudging or petty in giving or spending,” according to the website thefreedictionary.com.
There’s a second definition, with the word used in a sentence: “Meanly small; scanty or meager: left the waiter a niggardly tip.”
Howard would have had better luck getting a dead dog to play fetch than explaining why the word was no big deal. Some kind of rumor mill went into effect, one that had Howard saying not the word “niggardly,” but the dreaded “n” word itself.
Within days Howard was canned; Williams cowardly and cravenly accepted his resignation and the District of Columbia government was left with egg on its face.
There’s a lesson in that episode ESPN honchos might want to heed.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
