Asian American Athletes in Sport and Society

C. Richard King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317595311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For more than a century, sporting spectacles, media coverage, and popular audiences have staged athletics in black and white. Commercial, media, and academic accounts have routinely erased, excluded, ignored, and otherwise made absent the Asian American presence in sport. This book seeks to redress this pattern of neglect, presenting a comprehensive perspective on the history and significance of Asian American athletes, coaches, and teams in North America. The contributors interrogate the sociocultural contexts in which Asian Americans lived and played, detailing the articulations of power and possibility, difference and identity, representation and remembrance that have shaped the means and meanings of Asian Americans playing sport in North America. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the Asian American experience, ethnic relations, and the history of sport.

1 Introduction

Sport, Racism, and the Media

C. Richard King

Q: Name two athletes who broke the color barrier in professional sport in 1947.

A: African American baseball legend Jackie Robinson, as almost everyone knows, began a 10-year career with the Brooklyn Dodgers; Wat Misaka, a little-known Japanese American guard, played in three games for the New York Knicks.

Q: Name the Asian American athlete selected as most valuable player for his performance in a Super Bowl.

A: Korean American wide receiver Hines Ward was so honored in 2006.

These trivia questions are anything but trivial. In fact, the elusiveness of the answers for many readers underscores an unspoken aspect of sport in America: media preoccupations and audience prejudices erase the presence and excellence of Asian American athletes and coaches, fostering accounts that promote misunderstanding and misrecognition. Indeed, too often, fans, journalists, and even scholars act as if Asian Americans do not play sports and when they do, prevailing interpretations accentuate or efface their Asian heritage, resulting in distorted representations that twist, limit, and undermine the humanity of Asian Americans on and off the playing field. Moreover, collective remembrance through sport routinely celebrate the achievements of African American athletes like Robinson, while all but forgetting the accomplishments of Misaka and countless other Asian American athletes (see Franks, 2000). In many respects, the recent wave of “Linsanity” sparked by the rapid ascendance of Jeremy Lin in the NBA is the exception that proves the rule (Wang, this volume). These patterns offer valuable lessons about the biases of sport media and the scope and significance of racism in the contemporary United States.

Previous studies have suggested that popular accounts of sports have great difficulty treating Asian Americans fairly or accurately. On the one hand they have hidden them from view (Hanson, 2005), recycling a discourse that is either unable or unwilling to discuss their identities, histories, or athleticism. On the other hand, sport media rely on stereotypes in their coverage of Asian American athletes, often preferring clichés and jokes to grounded coverage of individuals and their achievements (King, 2006). Even within sport studies and ethnic studies, research remains limited. To be sure, a smattering of articles and book chapters have addressed Asian American sporting experience, but these often remain confined to a consideration of celebrated figures, particularly Tiger Woods and Kristi Yamaguichi (Creef, 2004; Yu, 2001); popular pastimes, such as baseball (Mullan, 1999, Nomura, 1993; Regalado, 2002); and expected pursuits, like martial arts (Ma, 2000). Importantly, the limited scholarship on this subject reflects two patterns of neglect that inform and inspire this project: sport studies has rendered Asian Americans invisible and, to a lesser extent, Asian American studies has neglected the history and significance of sport, even as it has turned toward the popular as a meaningful field of study and struggle. Significantly, this is in stark contrast to the immense attention devoted to African Americans and ethnic whites and the burgeoning interest in Native Americans and Latina/os. All of this underscores the uniqueness, import, and timeliness of Asian American Athletes in Sport and Society.

These patterns and practices of (in)visibility are especially important given the prominent place of sport as a means of reproducing and resisting racialized force fields. Indeed, sport has long proven central to popular representations and official regulations of race, creating uniquely powerful spaces for the rearticulation of racial ideologies and identities. For more than a century, sporting spectacles, media coverage, and popular audiences have staged athletics in black and white, mirroring predominant preoccupations and presuppositions about bodies and body cultures, no less than citizenship and society. Scholars in sport studies have done little to correct or remediate this construction. In fact, academic, commercial, and media accounts have routinely erased, excluded, ignored, and otherwise made absent the Asian American presence in sport. It is as if critics and fans alike have so fully embraced accepted stereotypes of the model minority and the yellow peril that they cannot conceive of Asian Americans as participants in sporting worlds, whether as spectators, players, or coaches. Asian American Athletes in Sport and Society seeks to redress this pattern of neglect.

Expectations

In his recent history, Indians in Unexpected Places, Philip Deloria unpacks what he dubs “expectations” of Indians and Indianness. Although seemingly simple, for Deloria, expectations refer to the complex interlockings of preconceptions and practices through which individuals and institutions have figured and refigured what it has meant to be an Indian. Consequently, he endeavors to expose the ideological arrangements and social formations that have shaped the making, unmaking, and remaking of Indianness by Indians and non-Indians alike. Although concerned with Native Americans during the first quarter of the 20th century, Deloria’s history offers an instructive model for thinking through the ways in which interpretive frames render individuals visible, acceptable, and understandable. Following Deloria, we might argue that sport media and their consumers do not expect Asian Americans to play or coach sports. According to Yun-Oh Whang, a professor of sport marketing at the University of Central Florida, “It is common that coaches and teachers at schools presume that an Asian American kid belongs in the science lab, not on the football field” (Lapchick, 2002). Such preconceptions, and the racial ideologies that anchor them, foster a context in which sport is an unexpected place. In turn, those Asian Americans who do enter sporting worlds find themselves out of place. In a real sense, fans, coaches, and journalists encounter difficulty interpreting their presence, which strikes them as incongruous, problematic, and even difficult to comprehend.

More often than not, the reiteration of stereotypes and “sincere fictions” seek to resolve these interpretive problems and ideological contradictions. Following Stuart Hall (1997), I understand stereotypes to emerge from a complex set of cultural relations and practices that condense and communicate simplified meaning about marked groups in unequal social systems. Stereotyping works to naturalize, flatten, and essentialize difference, and, in turn, to explain and extend existing social hierarchies. Significantly, the signifying practices central to stereotyping also lend themselves to the telling of sincere fictions, or sanctioned stories that mystify and mythologize social arrangements and actions and thereby seek to resolve lived contradictions. Moreover, as sociologists Hernan Vera, Joe Feagin, and Andrew Gordon continue,

These socially accepted fictions are sincere because the actors usually are genuine and honest in their adherence to these rationalizations and are either unaware of or have suppressed the alternative interpretations— psychological, sociological, and historical—of the events or people being fictionalized.

(Vera, Feagin, & Gordon, 1995, p. 297)

In other words, fans, coaches, and journalists rely on stereotypes of others and familiar stories about the social world to make sense of the presence and absence of Asian American athletes, the extent of their athletic ability, the core of their character, and so on.

The case of quarterback Timmy Chang offers a telling summary of the role of expectations, stereotyping, and sincere fictions in the (in)visibility of Asian American athletes. Chang had an outstanding career at the University of Hawaii, marked by a string of records, including total offensive yards, most career passing yards, most career plays from scrimmage, and most passes completed without an interception. Despite his impressive achievements, Chang was not selected in the 2005 National Football League (NFL) draft, but signed as a walk-on with the Arizona Cardinals, before moving to the Detroit Lions, the Rhein Fire of NFL Europe, and the Philadelphia Eagles. In 2007, he joined the Hamilton (Ontario) Tigercats of the Canadian Football League (“TiCats Sign QB Timmy Chang,” 2007). According to Richard Lapchick (2006), Chang’s collegiate greatness and professional obscurity turn on prevailing expectations:

a scout said at the NFL combine that Chang is too short to play quarterback in the NFL. Chang is 6-foot-1, which makes him as tall as or taller than several current NFL quarterbacks. When these comparisons were noted, the scout reportedly answered, “But he plays short.”

Much as sincere fictions about African Americans lacking the intelligence and character to play quarterback long segregated them from the position, so too, now do accepted understandings of Asian Americans put limits on their pursuits and public perceptions of them.

Naturalness

Even before an Asian American athlete takes the field, then, preconceptions shape interpretations. Significantly, physicality plays an important role in delimiting such interpretations, serving as a transit of sorts between sporting worlds and racial ideologies, both of which depend on popular conceptions of the body. Many Americans cling to the belief that Asian Americans possess superior intellectual gifts, especially in areas like math and science, while displaying a pronounced lack of physical prowess. They are not natural athletes, this line of racist thinking posits further, in part because of their docility, reserve, and softness. Understood to be smart and feminine, popular sentiments have concluded, they could never compete in the physical and masculine domain of sports. If it is not natural—in other words, defies expectations—for an Asian American to be naturally gifted at sports, this does not mean there are not born players. In fact, African Americans, who many Americans do think of as natural athletes, are thought to be intellectually inferior and hypermasculine. This complex racial calculus, according to David Leonard (this volume, 138–151), has consequences for the opportunities afforded players and coaches, reinforcing the hierarchical logic structuring sport in the United States:

The absence of Asian American coaches (and players) embodies the long-standing feminization of all things “Asian,” which, in turn, reserves desired athletic and leadership qualities for white coaches . . . This racialized definition of Asian men as weak exists as a guiding obstacle to Asian advancement in the collegiate ranks. Similarly, white supremacist discourses that position black men as purely physical, without the mental capabilities of their white counterparts, contribute to a scarcity of black coaches. The exclusion of [Norman] Chow and so many black coaches is the effect of the same racist system and hegemony of ideologies. The failure to investigate the links between Chow and, for example, Tyrone Willingham (the recently fired black head coach at Notre Dame), limits the discussion to individual prejudice and to a black/ white binary.

Importantly, then, the unnaturalness of Asian Americans in sport affirms a system that appears natural, one that excludes them and contributes to a rigid ranking of racial groups.

Black—White Paradigm

More often than not, sport does not simply confirm the natural abilities of individuals and groups; it also reproduces the most prominent means for making sense of racial difference in the United States: the black–white paradigm, which dictates that racial inequality can best be understood by an examination of past and present relations between Euro-Americans and African Americans. C. Richard King and Charles F. Springwood (2001) worked to expose the limitations of such a framework in their exploration of the interplay of whiteness, blackness, and Indian-ness in collegiate sport. Rather than a binary, they found that racial meanings, identities, and opportunities were triangular and dialogic, dependent on the articulations of expectations about multiple groups. Leonard, cited earlier, affirmed this assertion underscoring the import of including Asian Americans as well. Significantly though, the black–white paradigm displays great resilience and works to recast discussion of race in black and white terms.

No individual better illustrates this pattern than golfer Tiger Woods, who has sought to fashion a hybrid identity acknowledging his Asian, African, European, and Indigenous ancestors. The media, fans, and other golfers have roundly resisted this desire and have most frequently and vocally represented him as a black golfer—much to the chagrin of some in the Asian American community. Among the more telling public applications of the black–white paradigm and by extension erasure of his Asian American-ness were comments made by Fuzzy Zoeller at the 1997 Masters golf tournament at Augusta National in Georgia. Zoeller remarked,

That little boy is driving well and he’s putting well. He’s doing everything it takes to win. So, you know what you guys do when he gets in here? You pat him on the back and say congratulations and enjoy it and tell him not to serve fried chicken next year . . . or collard greens or whatever they serve.

In what was later described as a joke, Zoeller called on the one-drop rule to put Woods in his place. Or as Scott Thill (1997) interpreted it:

Previous essentialist concretizations like “white” and “black” have given way to fuzzier inferences like “cablinasian” and “multiracial,” these third terms that screw with one’s comfy binarisms. Racial axiomatisation is a thing of the past, like the ridiculous “1/32” rule, which could legally determine you were black if you had one black grandparent among 32 others. Most racial classifications of blackness have their roots in slavery, anyway: they were used to determine whether or not black children could be sold if their parents were slaves or free people. But for some reason, usually having to with the safeguarding of privilege and/or material possessions, people find it hard to function without the power of non-fuzzy, that is, classical logics. They cannot ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Sport, Racism, and the Media
• Society
• Celebrity
• Contributors
• Index