Overcoming Racism On The Court

My answer to the Quora question:

How do you deal with aggressive racists on the basketball court?

In middle school, I played a lot of AAU basketball. Whenever I played in the inner city tournaments, opposing players often called me a “chink”. Those players resorted to racial insults to get inside my head. Back then, I was really bothered by this and often relied on the support of my teammates to overcome the verbal banter.

When I was playing pickup basketball in Philadelphia last summer with more athletic teens/adults, I didn’t hear any racial insults. Rather, based on my nerdy appearance, they just played “easy” against me. After I scored a couple of threes and stole a few passes, they started playing real defense against me.

Unfortunately, many basketball players assume that Asian players are weak or unskilled. Regardless if you are a target of racist remarks or microagressions, just ignore them and outplay them. That’s what Jeremy Lin has done throughout his basketball career.