“Linsanity,” “Linfatuation,” even “Linderella.” For those of you who don’t know, these terms refer to Jeremy Lin, a Harvard grad and the New York Knicks’ rookie point guard.

Overlooked throughout his basketball career and after playing only 55 minutes in the Knicks’ first 23 games, Coach Mike D’Antoni decided to play Lin after a loss to the Boson Celtics, because, as he said, “we were playing so bad.”

On Feb. 4, Lin contributed a career-high 25 points in the Knicks’ victory over the New Jersey Nets. On Feb. 6, he started his first game against the Utah Jazz and scored 28 points in a 99-88 win. On Feb. 8, he made 23 points to beat the Washington Wizards 107-93. On Feb. 10, he had a career high 38 points against the Los Angeles Lakers, bringing the Knicks a 92-85 win. The next day, Lin’s 20 points helped clinch a tight win against the Minnesota Timberwolves, 100-98. The climax came in the Knicks’ Feb. 14 game against the Toronto Raptors, where Lin scored the game winning 3-pointer in the last second, bringing the final score to 90-87.

Unfortunately, Lin’s unprecedented debut as the first American-born player in the NBA of Chinese or Taiwanese descent has been marred by petty racism, most recently in the form of a tweet posted by Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock during Lin’s game against the Lakers. Whitlock’s post, which read “Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight,” has gone largely unrecognized by the media. Whitlock, who has remained exempt from any serious reprimands, later apologized for “debas[ing] one of sports’ feel-good moments,” but his Twitter post demonstrates that Jeremy Lin is much more than an NBA celebrity in this lockout-shortened season: he has become a beacon for a community that is vastly underrepresented in mainstream U.S. athletics.

Sports are not just sports. Like other forms of entertainment, they can magnify sentiments within cultures and communities, reflecting greater changes within society — consider the 1936 Hitler Olympics or the passing of Title IX in 1972.

However, I would argue that sports have had a different history of inclusion than other forms of entertainment, like movies or music. In the U.S., they have historically been reserved for upper-middle-class white males and have been associated with a hypermasculine image. Jeremy Lin clashes with this typecast; Whitlock’s tweet emasculates Lin, reflecting the stereotype that Asian men are physically inferior, and “belong in the orchestra,” as the member of an opposing team told Lin in high school. College junior Angus Chen, also of Taiwanese and Chinese heritage, notes that “people are still unwilling to accept that an Asian-American basketball player can be this good” because of this stereotype. Lin has been hesitant to make any pronouncements on how he feels about the controversy surrounding his heritage, though he has commented on the lack of Asian athletes in the United States. “Maybe I can help break the stereotype,” Lin has said. “I feel like Asians in general don’t get the respect that we may deserve when it comes to sports.”

This is not to discount the racism that countless other athletes have faced in the pursuit of being able to simply compete. Athletes like Jackie Robinson and Earl Lloyd have helped pave the way to make sports more inclusive at a time when they were not even permitted to stay in the same hotel as their teammates when they traveled.

Hopefully Lin’s racial background will not be the focus of his career, but will create a wider avenue for greater representation in mainstream athletics. Jeremy Lin and other athletes that break racial barriers should not be known primarily for their race, but as individuals that excel while under greater pressure and whose careers carry different meaning than their white counterparts.