Shaq's Apology Not Good Enough

You can bet Trent Lott wishes he could come back in a second life as a 7-foot-1-inch, 335-pound black man playing center for the Los Angeles Lakers.

What Shaquille O'Neal said about people of Asian descent is more direct and more racist than anything Lott may have conjured at Strom Thurmond's last birthday party.

And yet, today, Lott has been thoroughly ridiculed and stripped of power, while O'Neal remains playing above the rim, a beloved multimillionaire sports celebrity.

Why can a famous black person get away with saying something a famous white person could never say?

The double standard must have Lott practicing his foul shots.

O'Neal made his comments on "The Best Damned Sports Show" on the Fox SportsNet last June. Never mind that it was broadcast way back in the summer. The comments have been taped and replayed as recently as mid-December, the ugliness replicated like a bad virus.

Shaq was talking about Yao Ming, the 7-foot-5-inch center from Shanghai, China, now playing with the Houston Rockets.

Said Shaq, "Tell Yao Ming, 'Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so."

It didn't seem to bother the producers of the television show, or those at the radio show that has kept playing the tape. " It's a racist statement," Evan Mandelbaum, producer of radio station The Ticket 1050AM's "Tony Bruno Show," said to me over the phone this week. "But does that make Shaq a racist?"

Well, uh ... yes.

Or, at the very least, guilty of extreme ignorance.

Someone else who thought so was Irwin Tang.

Tang, 32, is a teacher at Austin Community College in Texas and a research fellow at the University of Texas' Center for Asian American Studies. Imagine waking up, as Tang did on Dec. 16, to hear Shaq say, "Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so."

Tang couldn't believe it.

Then, while driving to work the next day, Tang heard the sound bite again.

"Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so."

"I was sick," Tang told me during our phone call. "I just sat in my car, listened to it and felt sick. But then I just got pissed off. I was very angry."

Tang went to the mainstream media. But no one was interested in the story.

Finally, AsianWeek, the national Asian-American news weekly, which I contribute to, published Tang's op-ed piece just last week.

The Associated Press and other outlets suddenly became interested. And then Shaq, not known for his candor -- or his embrace of reporters -- came clean.

"If I offended anybody, I apologize," O'Neal told reporters.

But he didn't seem very contrite.

"To say I'm a racist against Asians is crazy," O'Neal told the media. "I'm an idiot prankster. I said a joke. It was a 70-30 joke. Seventy percent of the people thought it was funny. Thirty didn't.

"At times, I try to be a comedian. Sometimes I say good jokes, sometimes I say bad jokes. If I hurt anybody's feelings, I apologize."

Good enough?

Not by a long shot.

Trent Lott didn't get off with one simple apology.

First of all, if it was a joke, you know what Freud said about jokes: They aren't.

But I don't want to psychoanalyze Shaq. His math is more troubling. If he's right, and 70 percent thought the joke was funny, America is in real trouble.

To an Asian American, "Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so" is simply no joke.

It's a flat-out, unadulterated racist taunt, the prelude to an ass whipping, the prefatory remark to hate crimes against Asian Americans that include extreme physical acts of violence.

(In previous years, the number of anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States has ranged from 400 to 500 cases a year, according to annual audits conducted by the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. In fact, in the three months following 9/11, the organization documented nearly 250 cases, including two murders.)

To put it in more universal terms, would you laugh at a cross burning?

At the defacement of synagogues?

How about the bombing of African-American newspaper offices?

These aren't laughing matters.

Perhaps we should put it in terms Shaq might understand: If a white comedian imitated Shaq by making monkey sounds while eating fried chicken and watermelon, would the point be clearer?

Unfortunately, reaction to Shaq's apology has only garnered more apologies -- for Shaq.

Poor Shaq.

Los Angeles Times columnist J.A. Adande wrote, "It's 100 percent correct to say that O'Neal is wrong. What shouldn't even be considered for one second is that O'Neal is a racist. In private conversations, I've never heard him denigrate anyone on the basis of race."

No, he's only done it publicly: "Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so."

Certainly, it doesn't help O'Neal's case that the New York Post has linked him to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a guest at O'Neal's recent wedding. Farrakhan, the former calypso singer, is a noted black separatist.

And yet, most of what you'll see in the media has amounted to presenting Shaq with one huge "Get out of jail free" card.

All of a sudden, Shaq is getting media love.

Meanwhile, no one ever mentions Irwin Tang or others in the Asian-American community who know there isn't much difference between Shaq's joking taunts and the real ones that harm and instill fear and intimidation.

To Tang, last week's apology is not good enough.

"I don't want Shaquille O'Neal to be sitting around after the game and have a bunch of reporters asking him about this and say, 'Well, I'm sorry,'" Tang told me. "That's not going to satisfy me or the rest of Asian America."

Tang thinks the Lakers and the Rockets should organize a formal press conference where everyone dresses up and shows the proper respect. Shaq's comment wasn't just a slight against Yao. It was a slight against all people with Asian blood.

"There should be representatives of the Asian-American community there -- something more formal," Tang said. "And it should be a milestone in Asian-American history. After this point, this sort of thing should not be able to go unpunished."

Asian Americans, especially males, have been living with this sort of disrespect for years. If Shaquille O'Neal only knew a little more about history, about, for instance, how Chinese men were brought to America to replace slave labor at the turn of the century, he'd see how the struggle for equality facing blacks and Asians is a lot more similar than not.

That's why I've always considered Yao Ming a real breakthrough -- an Asian star in the NBA.

I have written that Yao is the great hope for all people of Asian descent in America -- the "Great Yellow Hope." He's a real stereotype buster. The end of Asian-male short jokes.

I even see Yao's first meeting against Shaq on Jan. 17 as a real cause for celebration, especially if Yao should stuff Shaq or go in for a monster dunk in a genuine SportsCenter moment more memorable than the driving of the Golden Spike, which marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad system.

I envisioned Yao's rise as the beginning of a newfound respect for Asian Americans. Instead, Shaq's comments indicate just the opposite. Heard any good Chinaman jokes lately?

But now comes an opportunity for something really historic. Here's the chance for an NBA press conference where Shaq apologizes and then embraces Yao in a true display of sportsmanship, and perhaps an acknowledgment of the multiple double standards that exist on race in this country.

Just ask Irwin Tang. Or Trent Lott.

It could be a big step forward.

And all of it just in time for Martin Luther King Day.