By Joy McMasters
Daily Bruin Staff
Tiger Woods for President: This campaign slogan may not be heard
during November’s elections, but according to Associate
Professor of history Henry Yu, it’s not as far-fetched as
some might think to have the presidency filled by a minority
athlete.
Yu, who is working on a book about race and sports, spoke
Thursday on his work-in-progress, “How Tiger Woods Lost His
Stripes.” The presentation is part of a lecture series
sponsored by the Asian American Studies Center and organized by a
research group called Asians in the Americas to mark Asian Pacific
American Heritage Month.
Sports has taken such a prominent role in America that Yu said
the first non-white president will be an athlete, and he supports
this hypothesis with the fact that many actors have translated
celebrity into political success.
“We no longer look to war as an arena for formation of
moral character,” Yu said.
Rather, America has turned to examining the character of
athletes on and off their battlefield.
“We want Tiger Woods to be better for us all in the ways
we want war heroes to be,” Yu said.
The war-like aspects of sport can be seen in the fierce
rivalries between cities displayed in people’s deep, lasting
loyalty to the home team and the huge amounts of money local
governments invest in providing grand venues for teams to call
home, Yu said.
“The transformation of sport into industry is a way of
America being understood around the world,” Yu said.
Even the NCAA basketball tournament, in which athletes are not
paid to play, brought in $6 billion from a broadcasting contract
with CBS.
Yu began thinking about race and power in the context of sports
four years ago when Woods made his leap into professional golf and
the public had such a hard time deciding how to classify him.
“Everybody talking about Tiger Woods couldn’t quite
make sense of his racial make-up,” Yu said. “He was
broken down in all manner of stripes and hues.”
While Woods is known to many as an African American golfer, he
is also of Thai, American Indian, and European descent and he can
be thought of as a prism providing varied perspectives and an
opportunity to examine both the role of race in sports and the role
of sports in society, Yu said.
“Since I’m mixed raced myself, I wanted to see if
that’s what it would be about,” said Asian American
studies graduate student Hazel Hill, who added that the idea of
Woods losing his stripes excited her.
“Capitalism, nationalism ““ it impacts everyone
whether we like it or not. I took seven pages of notes,” Hill
said. “It’s such a big topic.”
Notions of capitalism and nationalism merge in what Yu calls the
commodification of culture ““ from selling all-natural
products of the rainforest to the recent interest in Asia, but he
says notions of culture break down very quickly.
“The idea of culture being this “˜thing’ people
had came out of a period when there were migrants running into each
other,” Yu said. “It started as theories to explain
people you ran into and didn’t know.”
But he said these theories break down very quickly because the
truth behind the generalizations is so complicated.
The lecture series will continue examining Asians in America
over the next three Thursdays, with members of the research group
discussing topics such as Vancouver’s Chinatown and the role
of Asians in Latin America.
“We hope to bring together people who are researching
Asians in the Americas from Canada to the tip of South
America,” said Associate Professor Clara Chu of the research
group.
Urban planning graduate student Andrew Yan has also worked on
forming the research group, and will give a lecture Thursday, May
11, titled “Eight Stories Eight Buildings: a Brief
Architectural History of Vancouver, British Columbia’s
Chinatown and its Social Reflections” as part of the lecture
series.
Yan says the research group grew out of an interest in going
beyond the more traditional approaches to Asian American studies
and providing a new perspective.
“It’s an attempt to humanize the communities that
have come from Asia,” Yan said. “These are living
communities with connections to Asia ““ past, present and
future.”