WTF, Uggaversity

[flea]

Is this article, on the front page of today's student paper, kinda racist/xenophobic or what?

http://media.www.redandblack.com/media/storage/paper871/news/2008/10/22/Sports/Freshman.Brings.Japanese.Heritage.To.Team-3498317.shtml

I mean, she has a funny name! She's short! She plays volleyball!

Folks, she is an American citizen who was born here and lived her whole life here and sounds pretty much like any other student-athlete from the Atlanta suburbs. She just happens to be Japanese-American. Did the whole profile have to be about that? Are there so few Asian-Americans here that this is newsworthy?

Comments

[septembergrrl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's no story there other than her parents are from Japan. Is it part of a series of profiles of student athletes? That's the only reasonable news peg I can come up with, but still, weak.

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about the name thing. It does seem to assume that spectators will be taken aback by a foreign name.

I have less of a problem with the short thing, because she IS very short for a high-level volleyball player, so it's pertinent to the discussion.

[jesseh.livejournal.com]

There's also an errant apostrophe, which I might think is even worse.

[serrana.livejournal.com]

I'm quite sure we had Asian students at South Carolina, when I was there, and Athens has always liked to think of itself as more progressive than Columbia....*sigh*

[fatoudust.livejournal.com]

Apropos of nothing, my dad played collegiate volleyball at Michigan State. He was awesome at it. But we didn't inherit the athleticism.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

Was (is) he short?

[fatoudust.livejournal.com]

Yes, and also, you know, Japanese-American. But I don't think it was a particularly big deal since there seemed to have been a reasonably sized Asian population there.

Although it's a little hard for me to gauge what my parents went through because their experience was so different from mine. They weren't actually minorities, growing up in Hawaii. And they met in a Hawaii club at the college, so it seems like they always had Japanese friends and relatives around.

On the other hand, I never did, to the point where when my relatives were hassling me about dating once, I told them I'd be happy to marry a nice Japanese-American boy if I could ever meet one that wasn't my cousin.