Taste the Lin-Sanity

Generic Script

By now, we’ve all heard of Jeremy Lin. If ever there were a dark horse in the NBA, it’s this guy. Given our widely shared schema of an NBA player being a tall, black male who cruised through school on an athletic scholarship, here’s why: Lin is an Asian-American Harvard graduate with a degree in economics sans athletic scholarship. Oh, and he’s 6’3”, which is just bizarre in and of itself, right?

Let’s take a moment to pause and consider what might be wrong with everything I just said. Well, “schema” simply being a fancy way to say stereotype, I think we can all acknowledge that stereotypes, while having some basis in truth, have been a source for some less than ideal things—discrimination and racism, just to casually toss a couple out there.

So, when Ben & Jerry’s released a limited edition flavor of ice cream at their Harvard Square location called “Taste the Lin-Sanity”, it’s easy to understand why it caused quite the uproar: the frozen vanilla yogurt based flavor featured lychee honey swirls and pieces of fortune cookies. Yes, Asians like to eat lychees, and all Asian eateries in the States serve fortune cookies; they’re two food items with strong, truthful associations with Asian culture.

An Asian-American myself, I find the absurdity of this entire ice cream flavor situation amusing in a way myself, albeit it’s a twisted way. While something in me immediately senses something wrong with this whole picture, the reasoning behind it certainly doesn’t come right away. I, like many people, have been so accustomed to stereotypes, even when they’re about me, that I have to take time to talk myself through why reducing Jeremy Lin to lychee honey swirls and fortune cookies isn’t okay. The problem isn’t that I don’t have a sense of humor; it isn’t that I can’t have fun.

I’m sure there are many approaches I could take to argue my point, many of which would be more articulate, but what I would like to say now is that, while perhaps the ice cream in itself isn’t racist, the fixation on Lin being Asian and the ice cream being a byproduct of that fixation is indeed unwarranted. The message that this simple, certainly well intentioned ice cream flavor communicated is that Jeremy Lin is a phenomenon because he is Asian. Rather, the truth is that Jeremy Lin is a phenomenon in spite of the fact that he is Asian.

Ben & Jerry’s meant no harm of course, but the point is that too often we forget that with all of the subtle social constructs that we’ve learned and grown up with, we must also remember to unlearn. It’s difficult sometimes, it’s often written off as being uptight, over-reactive, et cetera, but honestly, who ever thought it would be easy?