Romney Flounders in Fishtown

February 17, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

What’s wrong with the Romney campaign?  Even amongst its supporters, it’s a common question.  Romney’s Boston headquarters ran a famously tight ship through most of the campaign thus far, but now that ship is listing.  If it does not plot a new course, it will founder on the shoals of a Republican populism that refuses to vote for someone who does not inspire, and wants a movement and not just a man.

The Romney camp is presently suffering a perfect storm of electoral challenges.

  1. They had staked their argument on Romney’s business proficiency and his capacity to turn around the economy — yet many Americans feel the economy is already turning around.  Remember that many of Obama’s most economy-killing measures were crafted so that they would not take effect until after his reelection.  Obama wants to raise taxes on the affluent; he promises and plans to do so in his second term.  So far, however, he’s minimized the burdens on the economy in order to allow for improvement — and thus to help his reelection prospects.  It’s working.  And the more the economy turns around, the less Romney seems necessary.  ”I’m the economic turn-around artist the country so desperately needs” was a lot more compelling than “My opponent slowed the recovery.”
  2. When Rich Santorum won three primaries in a single day on February 7th (Minnesota, Colorado, and a non-binding contest in Missouri), he suddenly seemed like a realistic alternative to a lot of conservatives uncomfortable with Romney.  The biggest thing holding Santorum back has been intangible — the sense that he’s not Presidential caliber, not equal to the Oval Office, and not a realistic option to defeat Romney.  He had little financial support, no organization.  But suddenly this guy who’d been driving around Iowa in a pickup truck was winning multiple states on a single day.
  3. Santorum has benefitted from the lamentably predictable self-destruction of Newt Gingrich.  Some of Newt’s supporters were enthralled with his intelligence, but his record as a conservative is mixed, and many of Newt’s supporters had rallied behind him only because they thought he was the only realistic alternative to Romney.  But Newt does not wear well, and the steady bleeding of supporters from Gingrich to Santorum became a veritable hemorrhage after February 7th.  If Romney cannot convince his skeptics, he needs to hope they remain divided between the Non-Roms — but now they’re coalescing.
  4. When all of this is combined with Romney’s previous positioning, it makes for an ominous situation.  In some ways, the Romney campaign in the 2012 cycle is an eerie reflection of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008.  Being the putative frontrunner, being “inevitable,” having the superior organization and network of powerful and well-healed supporters, is not all it’s cracked up to be.  It’s a boring story — and if there’s one thing our rapacious media machine cannot stand, it’s a boring story.  Every stumble from the “frontrunner” and every victory from a “challenger” creates new narratives the media want to tell.  It’s also not inspiring.  Americans don’t like to be told whom they’ll vote for, and they love the underdog.  America is an underdog story.  Romney has run a Competency Campaign — and that’s just not as inspiring as a Movement Campaign.  Competency, excellence, superlative achievement — these things are nice.  But we believe in causes, visions, uprisings.  Happily for Romney, there is no Republican version of Candidate Obama to go up against Romney the Inevitable in this cycle.  But many conservatives seem to be deciding that Santorum is close enough.

The greatest struggle of the Romney campaign so far, however, has been its inability to connect with social conservatives.  As long as the economy was tanking, enough social conservatives were willing to put their other causes aside in order to support someone who could turn the economy around.  Now that’s no longer the case.  More importantly, though, most social conservatives do not see their social conservative commitments to be something separate from their fiscal conservatism.  They see the values of social conservatism as indispensable supports for a thriving free market economy.

Charles Murray’s recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, opens up an interesting conceptual space for reexamining Romney’s campaign.  Murry described a dramatically widening gulf between two distinct white American cultures, which he describes through the use of statistical composites he calls “Belmont” (after a well-heeled suburb of Boston) and “Fishtown” (a blue-collar-to-poor part of Philadelphia).  He explains that his fictional “Belmont” is populated by people who “must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media.”  Residents of “Fishtown” must “have no academic degree higher than a high school diploma” and “if they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job…or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.”  20% of the white population aged 30-49 lives in Belmont and 30% live in Fishtown.

What is remarkable is how distinct the cultures are between Belmont and Fishtown, how unequal they are, and how much further apart they have grown in the five decades from 1960 to 2010.  Not only their income levels, but their participation in crime, their attitudes toward marriage and single parenthood, their work habits and economic values, and their participation in religious traditions (Belmonters are much more likely to practice faith).  But it goes further than this.  The cultural differences “have to do with the food the Belmonters eat, their drinking habits, the ages at which they marry and have children, the books they read (and their number), the television shows and movies they watch (and the hours spent on them), the humor they enjoy, the way they take care of their bodies, the way they decorate their homes, their leisure activities, they work environments and child-raising practices.”

At the risk of oversimplification, I think it’s a fair generalization: Romney is brilliant in Belmont.  But he flounders in Fishtown.

As it happens, Mitt Romney’s primary residence was in the real Belmont until very recently.  He’s lived most of his life in “Belmont.”  He has lived and moved amongst the upper crust, in a culture that seems further and further alienated from Fishtown all the time.  Belmont Republicans love him.  He shares their values, possesses the virtues they extol, excels at the things they admire.  They understand him and they trust him.

Fishtown Republicans do not.  Fishtown Republicans have increasingly insisted on identity politics — having candidates they can identify with, candidates they might expect to find drinking beer at their neighborhood barbecue — because they find so many politicians are increasingly distant from them.

But it’s more than that.  Fishtown Republicans are first-hand witnesses to the decay in the roots of America.  They want a politician who speaks not only to what transpires at the economic surface of the country, but who understands and addresses what is taking place in the moral and cultural depths.  The residents of Fishtown understand deeply and implicitly — because they see it right in front of them — that America’s economic doldrums are not merely a matter of mismanagement at the top.  They’re a matter of long-term cultural decay at the bottom.  Or to use a different metaphor, Romney promises to be a better captain of a ship whose hull is decomposing — and the sailors who work below decks know that plotting a better course of navigation will not save the ship from its ultimate fate.

It’s largely the Fishtown Republicans that have proven so uncomfortable with Romney that they’ve lurched from one non-Rom to another, because Romney has given no vision that appeals to Fishtown Republicans.  A vision of managerial brilliance, of resplendent competence across a variety of organizational spheres, does not touch Fishtown residents where they are.  Romney needs to speak to the culture of Fishtown – to its decay, its present shambles, and to a hopeful future in which that culture is restrengthened and forms the basis of a renewed American economy.

Romney needs — and quickly — to develop a coherent, full-orbed vision of American renewal, one that begins at the roots of moral and cultural regeneration and extends through political and economic transformation.  He should explain that conservatism is compassionate because conservative economic policies best serve all Americans, including the poor — but he should also speak to renewing not only the policies and regulations but also the moral musculature and the cultural values that nurtured the most extraordinary economic expansion in human history.  That would be a vision and a basis for a movement.  The Romney campaign has focused too much on Romney himself.  They need to present him as the leader of something larger than himself.  Otherwise, they won’t defeat Barack Obama, and they may not even win the nomination.

Filed Under: Election 2012, Mitt Romney

The Indignation Industry, or the Art of Blogging Controversies

February 14, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

I think we bloggers and writers of online content generally need to confess to something.  We often have mixed motives — or we face a complex set of competing incentives — when it comes to potentially controversial material.

I was reminded of this by Christian sociologist Jenell Paris — author of The End of Sexual Identity – and her “Memo to the Masses” regarding John Piper’s recent comments on God’s intention for a “masculine feel” to His church.  She writes not so much to side against Piper as to question the cottage industry of online indignation that creates a larger audience for controversial comments and tacitly grants them greater power.  She writes:

[O]ften, using social media to protest these men only facilitates the spread of their message, which is consent of a sort….The power of the masses is the power to grant or withdraw consent [the consent to be influenced]…So, let’s reject the authority of the Christian sexists. Stop giving them face time on our social media. Stop engaging their arguments as if they are intellectually or biblically worthy. Stop buying their books, even if just to critique them. Pay so little attention to them that next time someone tells you about their latest horror, you’ll be surprised they’re still around.

Let’s focus right now not on the question of whether Piper’s comments were sexist (it’s been discussed ad nauseum already) but on the right way to respond to comments we find outrageous.  When Mark Driscoll mocks effeminate male worship leaders, or when Robert Jeffress says that Christians should vote for fellow Christians before they vote for cultist Mormons, or when Brian McLaren so revises Christian theology that it’s no longer clearly Christian at all, what’s the right way to respond?  Clear denunciations, to communicate to our flocks or our followings that these sorts of comments are wrong or dangerous or unacceptable?  Or refusing to give them a platform?

One thing bloggers don’t like to talk about is the mixed motives that confront us here.  Most bloggers toil in relative obscurity, and even relatively successful bloggers are often dying for the next “hit.”  It can be addictive.  My first big hit came in an interview with Harvard law professor Bill Stuntz called “You Will Call, I Will Answer.”  I admired Stuntz greatly, and believed in the value of the piece, so it was thrilling to watch the traffic numbers soar.  I felt like I had caught a wave, and I wanted it to last as long as possible.  It was linked by Instapundit and Hot Air and Powerline, discussed in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.  I don’t know the social media numbers (the number of “Shares” and “Retweets” has been reset as we’ve changed social media widgets), but it spread swiftly and reached a huge pageview total.

I was thrilled for Bill — thrilled that his profound reflections on suffering and death were getting a wider circulation — and, if I’m honest, I was pleased for myself as well.  I wasn’t milking a controversy, but I learned how exciting it could be to “go viral,” and one thing you learn very quickly is that the easiest way to “go viral” is to be one of the first voices, or one of the loudest voices, or at least one of the most striking voices, in the midst of a controversy.

The classic case from recent years was March 2011, also known as Hell Month, or when Rob Bell’s Love Wins hit the blogosphere before it even hit the market.  I’ve spoken with Justin Taylor about it, and he (to his credit) does not keep track of his traffic numbers, but I know that his initial post (“Rob Bell, Universalist?”) on Love Wins received 250,000 pageviews in very short order, and went on, I believe, to somewhere around 400,000 pageviews or more.  Tim Challies posted the first online review in the evangelical community, and it received a couple hundred thousand pageviews as well.  To be clear, I do not think that Taylor and Challies specifically were motivated by traffic.  Their blogs are already very large, and their theological worldview was very directly attacked by Bell.  What drove the controversy over Love Wins was not its advocacy of a kind of backdoor universalism but its attack upon more traditional views of divine judgment as cruel, oppressive and borderline abusive.

But when Facebook counts 25,000 shares, other bloggers take notice.  At best, they want to add their voice to an important conversation.  At worst, they want a piece of the action.  For most bloggers, I suspect, it’s a bit of both.  Suddenly everyone is talking about Rob Bell, the search-engine numbers go through the roof, and a growing cyclone draws more and more bloggers to produce more and more traffic to attract more and more bloggers who produce still more traffic…and suddenly a mediocre book (in my opinion) that did not deserve a large audience in the first place becomes a mega-bestseller and the conversation expands outward from the blogosphere until it’s on the front page of Time magazine.  Some of the same people who were the first to comment on Bell’s book deeply rued that they inadvertently helped make it a bestseller.

Let me illustrate the story with two of my own bloggers.  Both of them are scholars who were asked by many friends and readers to address the controversy.  One, whose traffic was 170,000 pageviews in February, went to 260,000 pageviews in March and continued with high numbers as his multi-part response stretched into April.  The effect was even more profound for a blogger with a smaller audience of 23,000 pageviews in February.  His traffic skyrocketed to 76,000 pageviews in March.  Both of them deserved it.  Both wrote excellent material that helped guide people through the important issues at stake.  Heck, I saw my own traffic spike as well, though it was scattered over blog posts and articles and interviews.  And when we see this sort of thing, it gets easier next time to crave the controversy and want to be the first person into the fray.

In fact, some bloggers have practically built their blogging careers on their responses to controversies.  Rachel Held Evans is an excellent blogger, yet the posts that have made her reputation (and have expanded her following) have mostly been responses to sexism controversies.  I may not always agree with her, but it’s a worthy cause.  One of our bloggers (in a different faith tradition) had a middle-sized blog in the 50,000 pageview range before he responded with grace and vigor to a controversy in his faith community — and after his traffic spiked to 200,000 monthly pageviews, he managed to keep it there permanently.

There’s a financial dimension here as well.  Most bloggers of size are compensated, directly or indirectly, on the monthly pageviews total.  If you’re directly compensated on the number of pageviews you bring to a website that hosts you, then you may typically earn a humble amount, but you can see a pay spike to go with your traffic spike.  I’ve seen bloggers receive nearly $2000 for single posts that go viral.  That’s nothing to sneeze at!  Or if you work through an ad network like Beacon Ads, then you can raise your rates and increase the number of ad impressions you sell after your traffic numbers have risen.

So what are some guidelines we might use?  Pastor P says Controversial Statement X.  We blog because we love to write about these things, but we want to do so for the right reasons and not give more oxygen to a belief we think is bigoted or ignorant.  Here are some questions you can ask yourself before you respond:

  1. Am I responding to a controversy or creating one? Lest it seem as though I was being critical of Justin Taylor and Tim Challies (I was not) above, let me mention that I once asked Justin and Tim whether they’d write a response to Brian McLaren’s recent book.  Each (independently) told me that he didn’t want to use the platform God had given him to give McLaren’s book (which they – and many others – regarded as terribly misleading theologically) more prominence than it would otherwise achieve in evangelical circles.  McLaren’s book came and went, and had much less influence than it would have had if its arrival had been heralded with Rob-Bell-like buzz.  Contrast this with, say, Robert Jeffress’ comments about Mormonism at the Values Voters Summit, or Harold Camping’s comments on armageddon.  Those were already live issues in the mainstream media and they were going to get buzz whether or not evangelical bloggers addressed them.
  2. Have I fully digested and assessed this issue? Sometimes the temptation is so strong to be the first person to comment on an issue that we rush out responses that are less thoughtful – and often less charitable – than they should be.  Never respond to something in the first flush of indignation.  Yes, others may beat you to the story.  But the point is not to write something, anything, that gets traffic.  The point is to write something that full of grace and truth.  The point is to edify.  Give it a day.  If God’s really given you something to say, a day’s not going to derail his intention.
  3. Do I really have anything important to add to the conversation? If you’re just going to say what others have said already — or say it louder — or even if you think you can say the same thing better or more clearly – it may not be worth adding to the hubbub.  If someone else has already done a boffo job, post a link and a quotation.  Herald their excellent work and educate your readers without adding to the noise.  If what you wanted to say has already been said, then thank the Lord and turn off the computer.
  4. Assess your motives.  Even with all of the above, it’s possible to write a piece for the wrong reasons, or write it in such a way (with an exaggerated title, or overwrought condemnations) that does not honor the virtues of Christ.  We should give expression to the goodness of God not only in our words but also in the way we speak them.  If you don’t feel you can do so, hold your tongue.
  5. Remember the power of compassion.  One of the bigger pieces I’ve written was “A Letter to Harold Camping and His Followers.”  I whipped it up in 30 minutes on the faux Judgment Day — and it exploded.  Within half an hour, my phone was buzzing and buzzing with people subscribing to my Facebook and Twitter accounts.  It was not “Rob Bell, Universalist?” but it did get 10,000 Facebook shares and 100,000 pageviews.  The lesson it taught me was important: people are starving for compassion on the internet.  When we think of tapping into controversies, we think of expressing strong disagreement and righteous indignation.  But the people involved are always…well, they’re people.  They’re people with stories and struggles and blind spots.  Sometimes compassion is the most surprising — and the most convicting — response.  Remember: it was God’s kindness that moved us to repentance.

Please leave comments if you have other thoughts and ideas.

Filed Under: Blogging, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

These French Never Surrender

February 12, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

Two of the finest people I’ve come to know through my work with Patheos are David and Nancy French.  When we decided that we would publish columns at Patheos, David was the first columnist I sought.  I had come to know David and Nancy through their work with Six Seeds — as I was getting to know www.sixseeds.org better and explore ways in which we might work together (Patheos’ Family Portal is now produced by Six Seeds).  I thought that David would turn me down; he’s a high-octane constitutional lawyer specializing in free speech issues, for FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and then ADF (Alliance Defense Fund) and now the ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice).  He’s also a military reservist (not many Harvard-trained lawyers volunteer to join the military and go to Iraq, but David did) and the father to three children, one of them adopted.

To my complete surprise, David explained that my timing was perfect and he would take up the offer.  His columns were often controversial; David is passionately committed to some opinions that are not politically correct.  But he’s a first-rate thinker, an excellent writer, and a man of extraordinary principle.  Love him or not (and I love him), David has the courage of his convictions.  He drew the largest audience of all my columnists.  We also became friends, as we share many passions: God, politics, the Lord of the Rings, sci-fi/fantasy in general, and computer gaming (a passion, sadly, I cannot much pursue these days).  When David moved to the ACLJ, we moved him to a blog with Nancy at The French Revolution.  Since that time, I’ve actually gotten to know Nancy more than David, and his great insight and judgment are proved by the quality of the wife he won.  David writes regularly now at The Corner at the National Review Online, and I collaborate with David and Nancy on Evangelicals for Mitt.

Well, David just won a magnificent honor: the Ronald Reagan Award from the American Conservative Union, awarded to him at CPAC.  The Reagan Award is the highest award given at CPAC.  The recipients are not always well known, but as David Keene (then director of the American Conservative Union) said in 2008: “The winners of this award, our highest honor, are not household names, but the men and women working in the trenches who sacrifice and, in so doing, set an example for others.”  (Another friend, Ruth Malhotra, was co-recipient of the award in 2009, as it happens.)

David delivered an impromptu speech that was funny and moving and compassionate all at once — while his adopted daughter Naomi nearly stole the show behind him.  Check it out:

Apparently Nancy knew that the award was coming, but had to keep it a secret from David.  What a secret to keep!  Major congratulations to the entire French family and major thanks for their sacrifices on behalf of our country.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Why Jeremy Lin Matters — With an Unpublished Interview

February 11, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

My recent post on NBA insta-celebrity Jeremy Lin — “Jeremy Lin and the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations” — garnered a fair amount of controversy.  To supply some backstory: shortly after Jeremy’s outstanding off-the-bench performance against the New Jersey Nets, a friend forwarded the video highlights to me with a note that some of her Asian-American male friends were deeply moved at the sight of someone “like them” succeeding on the highest stage against the mega-athletes of the NBA.  I watched the video and sent a note back: “Love the video.  Wish the commentators weren’t talking about him like he’s some kind of kid.”  My friend responded that she felt the same way — and that many of her Asian-American friends also felt the commentators were (unintentionally) demeaning.

The concern of my post was not to allege that the commentators were racist.  In fact, I explicitly said that I thought they were not.  But I did say that I thought the commentators’ words were consistent with a pattern of “low expectations” over the course of Jeremy’s career so far that seemed to stem from ethnic stereotypes.  Jeremy has been consistently overlooked and underestimated, in other words, because people simply don’t expect an Asian-American to succeed in a sport like basketball — especially one who’s relatively small (though in the average range for a Point Guard) and has to get by on speed, strength, guts and guile.

Many readers agreed with my assessment.  Others did not — and I was fairly roasted for suggesting the commentators were guilty of “soft bigotry.”  Of course, what’s so insidious about the soft bigotry of low expectations — which expresses itself by not expecting or demanding the highest levels of success from people who belong to a particular group — is that it looks like kindness.

The truth is that I cannot know what took place in the hearts and minds of the commentators — and neither can those who disagree with me.  It would have been more charitable for me to assume the best of them.  But this assumes that I thought poorly of them.  I really don’t think ill of the commentators.  I just think they belong to a culture (we all do; it’s our culture) that expects Asian-American males to succeed in some things and not in others, to perform well in some sports and not in others.  I spent some time thinking this over when I thought I was going to have a son.  He would be half-Chinese, and he would face a veritable armada of stereotypes.  On his behalf, I would be grateful for a courageous young man like Jeremy Lin who doesn’t fold his arms and resent the stereotypes but goes out onto the court day after day and explodes the stereotypes by achieving success in an arena where he’s not supposed to.

And that’s the point.  That’s what the post was about: Why Jeremy Lin matters to the Asian-American male.

Now let me turn to new territory.  After my interview with Jeremy in March 2010 — when he was a student and I was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard — we kept in touch.  I had been an elite gymnast whose spiritual life had been fundamental to his athletic life.  He was too.  I interviewed Michael Chang (and Michael had taken Jeremy under his wing), was friends with the young pastor who mentored Jeremy, and I sent Jeremy some followup questions after he made it onto the Golden State Warriors.

I never published the Q&A.  I was holding onto it until I found the right angle or occasion — and the right time never arose.  So what follows are the questions and answers with Jeremy in August 2010.  To review: Jeremy had taken part in the NBA Summer League in 2010 and performed well against top draftee John Wall, well enough to be signed by the Golden State Warriors in July.  I wrote Jeremy the next month, and he was kind enough to respond.

What stands out to me is that Jeremy is a person of great courage and determination, a young man who speaks of his faith unabashedly but is not out to self-promote.  He doesn’t go on at great length or depict himself as a the protagonist in a faith-hero story.  In the midst of some ups and downs, his trust in God is strong and grounded.  Since Jeremy has now spread Linsanity from coast to coast, I offer this Q&A for posterity’s sake, as a glimpse into his spirit as he was struggling to find his way into the NBA.  This is a part of why Jeremy matters.  He is not only an extraordinary basketball player, and not only an Asian-American, but an impassioned believer who will use the platform God has given him for the good.

DALRYMPLE: What was your reaction when you were not selected in the draft? Was it discouraging or difficult to keep the faith?

LIN: It was very disappointing.  But I tried to keep my head up and stay faithful.  In so many instances in my life, God has turned what seemed to be “bad” situations into great ones.

Yet God provided a way for you into the NBA — and perhaps a better way — through the summer league.  Do you have any notion of why God took you through this particular process, rather than having you drafted?

I can’t say exactly why God had me take the path I took, but I know that He has more than revealed His power and sovereignty to me throughout this incredible process.

You opened a lot of eyes when you were up against John Wall.  Did you realize that that particular game was a great opportunity for you?  Was it one of those games where you felt a tangible encouragement and strengthening from the Spirit?

I knew that the Wizards game was the best opportunity for me to showcase myself.  I definitely felt like God was guiding me and enabling me throughout the game.

In the end, according to reports, you were courted by the Los Angeles Lakers and the Golden State Warriors.  On the one hand the world champions, and on the other hand the hometown team.  How’d you decide between them?

I chose the Warriors because of four main reasons: the location, the terms of the contract, roster space for a player like me, and style of play.

What do you need to do now in order to establish a solid footing in the NBA?  Will it help or hurt to be near family and friends?

I have to stay disciplined and consistent with my devotionals and fellowship.  I am going to be discipled by my pastor from my home church — and will attend my home church.  That will help out a lot.

How will you strive to use the platform that God has given you?

I have a heart for inner city ministry and nonprofit work.  So I’m learning and praying about what exactly that means.  I’m just trying to learn a lot and be sensitive to God so that I can expand his kingdom as much as possible.

Filed Under: Jeremy Lin Tagged With: , , ,

Jeremy Lin and the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

February 6, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

Sometimes compliments are the worst insults.

In early 2010, back when he was a Harvard phenom, I had the privilege of interviewing NBA basketballer Jeremy Lin.  We were still building this crazy thing called Patheos, so I met Jeremy at his dorm and used a $150 HD camera.  I presented the interview in text form (see Part One and Part Two) because Jeremy spoke in an immobile monotone.  Even so, Question 1 of my homemade interview has gotten over 36,000 views.  Suffice it to say that Jeremy Lin has a following.

He particularly has a following amongst Asian-Americans.  And some Asian-American young men, long stereotyped as timid and unathletic, nerdy or effeminate or socially immature — have fought back tears (which may not help with the stereotype, but is understandable under the circumstances) as they watched Jeremy Lin score 25 points, 7 assists and 5 rebounds for the New York Knicks.  Here are the highlights, but the lowlights are the pseudo-compliments from the commentators, whose astonishment at Jeremy’s success speaks volumes:

I loved watching Jeremy’s aggression on the court and his enjoyment of the game.  I loved seeing his teammates’ celebration, since Jeremy has obviously won their hearts with his courage and kindness.  I did not love the belittling comments.  Now, I’m always reticent to cry “racism,” and I won’t cry “racism” in this case.  The commentators are not showing hatred of a race.  I won’t even call it bigotry — at least not bigotry outright.  If anything, they’re showing what President Bush famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Their astonishment at the sight of Jeremy Lin outperforming the other players, their consistent references to how exhausted he must be, and how “magical” a night he’s having (rather than a natural result of talent and hard work) suggests that they’ve bought into the stereotype of the physically inferior Asian-American male.

[Update: Yes, I know they have other reasons to be surprised by his big night -- he's never played so much and never scored so much in a single game.  I may be being unfair here, but I still hear echoes here of the same kind of "low expectations" that Lin has had to deal with, as an Asian-American basketballer, throughout his entire career.]

I grew up in the Bay Area with a Korean adopted sister and best friends who were Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino.  I married an extraordinary Chinese-American woman, and thus joined her family and community (amongst whom I now live).  Even though I’m Caucasian, I’ve been around Asian-American communities long enough to see that Asian-American men and women face different stereotypes and different challenges.  Asian-American women by and large have a positive, helpful image in American society.  Although some Asian-American women will complain about stereotypes of submissiveness or nerdiness or asexuality, so many Asian-American women have become doctors, lawyers, reporters and businesswomen that they’re generally seen as intelligent, professional, attractive, friendly, and relatively innocent or untainted by bad attitudes and bad influences.  Even positive stereotypes can be confining, of course, but they’re better than negative ones.

For Asian-American men, in contrast, the positive stereotypes are few: they’re good at math and good at short-people sports like table tennis and gymnastics.  The negative stereotypes are legion: they’re the geeky, socially inept guys with coke-can glasses in the engineering labs; they’re the perpetual adolescents playing video games on their super-computers at thirty or forty years old; and they’re the physically and sexually immature, small and timid young men who can’t talk to girls and get their second jobs before they get their first kiss.

Like most stereotypes, these come from somewhere.  Recent generations of immigrants from Asia have come from the wealthy and the educated, so that the families who make it to the United States are among the most intelligent and ambitious that Asia has to offer.  Of course they tend to be successful.  If it was only the most athletic Australians who could manage the immigration experience, then Australian-Americans would tend to be athletic at a higher percentage than Americans in general.  Also, the sons of immigrants from Asia are pressed by their parents (and by their own sense of filial duty) into careers that are secure and financially rewarding, like engineering and medicine.  (Daughters are typically allowed to take a little more risk.)  Some Asian-American men grow up in ethnic enclaves where they’re relatively sheltered because their parents are (with great justification) suspicious of American cultural influences.  And they may begin romantic relationships later because their culture encourages them to focus first on their education and professional development.  Isn’t that a good thing?

But stereotypes are stereotypes because they’re intellectually lazy generalizations that only tell a part of the story.  They feed more off our ignorance and our fears than our knowledge and understanding.  The stereotypes I listed above do not describe the Asian-American men I know, or only offer a profoundly caricatured description of one part of their character.

Jeremy, like many Asian-American male athletes, is consistently underestimated.  Great basketball players don’t come from Harvard for a very simple reason: because great basketball players don’t go to Harvard in the first place.  They’re recruited by Duke or Kansas or UCLA or UNC.  A high school basketball player with Jeremy Lin’s statistics should have been recruited heavily by the nation’s top programs.  But Jeremy Lin was unrecruited and had to send video tapes and pitch himself.  He performed brilliantly in college, and many college coaches kicked themselves for overlooking him.  Then he was undrafted for the NBA — but performed well in the Summer League and was picked up by the Warriors.  Arguably, there are reasons he was overlooked other than race.  Jeremy isn’t the flashiest player; never the tallest or strongest guy on the court (he entered high school 5’3″ and 125 lbs), he has had to add layer after layer of skills and strategies and basketball intelligence.  But still, someone with his track record, someone with his statistics and all around game, would have gotten more notice if he weren’t a relatively small, baby-faced Asian-American in a league that has hardly ever seen an Asian-American succeed.

Jeremy Lin and Yao Ming

Jeremy is not Yao Ming, a 7’6″ freak of nature with tree-trunk legs who could have an impact even if he was not terribly athletic or aggressive.  He’s 6’3″, broad-shouldered, 200 pounds, and 24 years old — but he looks a bit boyish next to the towering hirsute beasts of Eastern Europe.  But that’s part of what’s great about him.  Jeremy cannot depend on his size.  He has to depend on skill, speed — and fearlessness.  Jeremy looks at the guys on the court, 5 inches or 10 inches taller than him, 50 pounds or 100 pounds heavier, and he can’t wait to take them on.  And he often beats them.

Standing in a room full of other Asian-American men, Jeremy looks like a giant.  Standing on an NBA court, he looks like those other Asian-American men looked next to him.  He represents them in the NBA.  That’s why Jeremy Lin is more than a mere basketball player for Asian-American men.  Many Asian-American men love basketball with a passion.  Some part of them may have bought into the stereotype themselves.  To be crude about it: could a guy like me, an Asian-American, hold his own on the court with these mammoth African-American super-athletes?  He takes their doubts and insecurities — and schools them on the court.

I asked Jeremy whether it felt like a burden to carry the hopes and expectations of so many Asian-American men upon his shoulders, and he answered that he couldn’t play for other people.  ”I can’t even play for myself.  The right way to play is not for others and not for myself, but for God.  I still don’t fully understand what that means.  I’m still learning to be selfless and submit myself to God and give the game up to Him.  My audience is God.”  He does, however, have a responsibility to be a “godly role model,” and when I asked whether it would please him if his success shattered negative stereotypes of Asian males, he broke into a big smile.  ”I would be pleased,” he said.  ”Absolutely, I would be pleased.”

So would I.  You go, Jeremy.

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