Jeremy Lin knew that his new dreads would ruffle a few feathers, and the hair did indeed draw Kenyon Martin‘s ire.
The former Nets big man accused Lin of wanting to be black.
“Do I need to remind this damn boy that his last name is Lin. Like, come on man. Let’s stop this man, with these people,” Martin said in an Instagram video. “Like, there’s no way possible he would’ve made it on one of our teams with that bulls–t going on on his head.
“Come on, man. Somebody really need to tell him, like, ‘Alright bro, we get it. You want to be black.’ Like, we get it. But the last name is Lin, alright?”
Lin clapped back with a painfully-polite and thoughtful written response.
Yesterday @JLin7 wrote a deeply introspective column on cultural appropriation. Today he was forced to remind Kenyon Martin about Kenyon Martin’s tattoos pic.twitter.com/S4vS4agSsw
— Pablo S. Torre (@PabloTorre) October 5, 2017
Lin doesn’t want people attacking Martin, who responded to the furor by saying that he was merely joking.
Per the NY Post:
“I’d say first I hope that a lot of Asian fans don’t go on his page and say racist things to him,” Lin said. “That’s not the right way to go about it. In a lot of ways to pit us against each other — I won versus Kenyon Martin winning — I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it. It’s not really about winning or losing. The whole point is we’re trying to be unified.
“So I feel like even when some people come at me like ‘Man, you embarrassed him.’ It’s like dude, that’s not what it’s about. That’s not the whole point of this discussion is to pit us into two sides and see who wins. The whole point is we all have to get on the same page. We need to have people stop going on his page saying racist things to him, too. That’s not OK.”
