A day after league official Marc J. Spears of ESPN told that the G League is investigating a claim by Jeremy Lin that he was called “coronavirus” during a game, Lin tweeted that he “doesn’t name or shame anyone”.
“I know this will disappoint some of you, but I don’t name or shame anyone,” Lin tweeted Saturday“What good does it do in this situation if someone is broken down? It doesn’t make my community safer or solve any of our long-term problems with racism.”
In a Facebook post Thursday, Lin, the former NBA warden who now plays for the G League’s Santa Cruz Warriors, spoke out about the racism he believes the Asian-American community continues to experience and gave examples that he says he has experienced.
“As a nine-year NBA veteran, I don’t protect myself from being labeled ‘coronavirus’ by the court,” he wrote.
Lin did not specify when he was called, and it was unclear whether the incident occurred in the G League bubble in Orlando, Florida, where Lin currently plays as a member of Santa Cruz, the affiliate of Golden State Warriors.
Lin became the first American-born NBA player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent when he broke with the Warriors in the 2010-11 season. He was best known for a high-scoring piece – one that led to victories with the New York Knicks during the 2011-12 season – that was dubbed “Linsanity”. In total, the former Harvard star averaged 11.6 points and 4.3 assists in 480 NBA games from 2010 to 2019.
He had previously spoken out about racial taunts he received while playing, saying in a 2017 podcast that while some came during his time in the NBA, they were much worse during his four years at Harvard while competing in the road of 2006 to 2010.
“When I experienced racism in the Ivy League, it was my assistant coach Kenny Blakeney who talked me through it,” Lin tweeted Saturday. He shared with me his own experiences as a black man – stories of racism that I couldn’t understand. Stories of how he was called the n-word and things were thrown at him from cars. He drew from his experiences with identity to teach me “How to stay strong in mine. He was also the first to tell me I was an NBA player as a sophomore at Harvard. I thought he was crazy.”
Before his G League stint this season, Lin played in the Chinese Basketball Association.