Rise of Asian hate in sports shouldn’t be tolerated
Eugene Chung has become a leading voice, a hero really, to many in sports who combat hate. Like others who wage this battle, in this case against antiasian hate, Chung didn’t choose this fight, it picked him. The former NFL player is proving to be a formidable foe.
And like others, he’s been disturbed by a series of anti-asian hateful incidents in sports. One after another in recent weeks, showing how far we haven’t come, and how many light years we apparently have to go.
A disgusting remark from a broadcaster. A racist gesture from a Green Bay Packers player. These incidents follow others like what happened with an ESPN broadcaster and then what occurred with Chung.
“It’s all just terrible,” Chung told USA TODAY Sports. “What I don’t want to happen is people becoming desensitized to it. People try to write these things off as jokes but they’re not. They’re ugly things. Until people understand this, we need to keep calling these incidents out.”
These incidents seem to keep coming and few are learning from them.
The racism against Shohei Ohtani is particularly disturbing because he is, easily, one of the most likeable, marketable, and remarkable stars in all of sports. Maybe in a generation.
With Ohtani, the mitochondria of the racism he faces is fairly simple to dissect. It’s both a guttural dislike of seeing an Asian man be the best player in the sport normally dominated by whites. That’s not every case but I’m sure that’s a lot of it.
There’s an emotional and cultural attachment some whites have to baseball that angers them when the face of it isn’t white. It’s not just fans, either. It’s a significant number of broadcasters and people in the media, too.
It’s strikingly similar to the racism Black quarterbacks faced as their numbers increased in the NFL.
In other cases, like with ESPN’S Stephen A. Smith, an Asian man can’t be the face of baseball because he doesn’t speak English, which is one of the most absurdly bigoted things you will hear, since the sound of a bat cracking, and a strike hitting a catcher’s mitt, doesn’t require a U.N. translator, just joy.
To Smith, who apologized, in the moment he said those words, that face belonged to someone white.
The latest Ohtani racist incident comes just a short time after another disgusting moment involving Packers wide receiver Devin Funchess.
What’s clear is we are seeing a surge of anti-asian hate in sports. The incidents are numerous and likely a byproduct of this awful era where hate against Asians has reached levels this country hasn’t seen in decades.
The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism says hate crimes against Asians increased by 150 percent in America’s 16 largest cities in 2020. There was a mass shooting at Atlanta area spas in which eight people, six of them Asian women, were shot dead.
The question is why the increase in Asian hate in sports? The answers, to me, are twofold. First, part of it is former President Donald Trump’s (and his allies) use of a slur to describe the coronavirus. This language led directly to hateful acts against Asians. This isn’t opinion. This is fact.
The other reason is that sports have always been part of America’s culture wars, from Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick to now.
As the country steadily becomes majority-minority, sports used as nationalistic wedge will become even more common. In fact, the reaction to Ohtani, in my view, is the leading edge of this.
As the white population shrinks, some will cling to old notions of what America means. To some, it means baseball is white, and a dominant Asian player, well, isn’t that.
I wish I could say this was all going to get better soon. But I fear it’s not. I fear we are traveling down a frightening path that may take decades to repair.
In the meantime, there are people like Chung, and others, who are heroes, fighting the anti-asian hate, and teaching us all lessons we can, and need, to absorb.
“My main message is we’re all human beings,” Chung said. “It shouldn’t matter if you’re Black, white, Asian, Latino or any race. We’ve created these barriers between the races and it doesn’t have to be that way.
“A lot of this comes back to what I said earlier. You have to let people know that speaking about Asians, or any group, in these hateful ways, is unacceptable. It needs to be called out. Everyone needs to speak out against it. It should never be tolerated.”