It boggles the mind that we have been living under "Linsanity" for only a month. It was on February 4 that Jeremy Lin stepped into the iconic Madison Square Garden arena and led the New York Knicks to a victory against the New Jersey Nets, catalyzing a worldwide media frenzy that continues to spawn one bad pun on his name after another.

Lin’s unlikely rise to fame hits all the right notes of a sensational news story. He is a Harvard graduate and the first Taiwanese-American National Basketball Association (NBA) player. He was undrafted and unsigned and had bounced from team to team. He was couch-surfing — his future so uncertain that he had not committed to a place to live in New York. And just as he was possibly going to be cut from the team, his coach put him on the court and he performed so well that he started the next game. The rest is history, as they say, and Lin has led his flagging team to 10 wins in the last 14 games.

What makes Lin’s rise from obscurity to superstardom so fascinating is the same reason the classic underdog story is so compelling — it reflects our hope and desire that one day, if only given the chance, our hard work and special talents will be recognized and we will prove all our doubters wrong. His heartwarming story validates one of our most cherished beliefs about the promise of the American Dream: It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from. In a nation founded on meritocracy, perseverance and hard work will pay off.

Lin’s meteoric rise has caused sports commentators to reassess why Lin had remained underutilized and overlooked. Some have concluded that it was because of Lin’s race that he had not been taken seriously. As Kobe Bryant remarked after a game in which Lin scored 38 points and led the Knicks to victory over the Los Angeles Lakers: "I hear this stuff about how he came out of nowhere and I think it’s a load of crap. You can’t play that well and just come out of nowhere." Of course, Lin was there all the time. He was only invisible because he didn’t look like what elite basketball players are supposed to look like.

Lin’s high school coach has since come out and speculated that it was because of racism that Lin was not offered any basketball scholarships. Lin himself has pointed out that sports commentators who say he is "deceptively athletic" imply that this deception is the result of his being Asian.

But, in the media portrayal of Lin’s "success story," racism is simply a complicating feature of a story that eventually ends happily ever after. Our protagonist sinks the game-winning shot and is everyone’s hero. In this narrative, racism is an obstacle that has been overcome and Lin’s current success is perceived as yet another example of how the American Dream falls into place.

This storyline cannot, however, explain the persistence of racist ideas about Asian Americans. From sports writer Jason Whitlock’s tweet about Lin’s lack of masculinity to the racial slur in an ESPN headline, what the Lin phenomenon makes painfully obvious is how ill-equipped mainstream media is to discuss Asian Americans.

Even supposed "tributes" to Lin can be off the mark, as in the recent "goof" by Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream giant that has become a household name for its progressiveness. The flavor, "Taste the Lin-sanity," is an unfortunate concoction of frozen yogurt, swirls of lychee honey, and crumbled fortune cookies.

A recent New York Times article on the close-knit dynamic of the Lin family also rehashes common stereotypes even as it aims to suggest the family’s singularity and difference from all the other more conservative Chinese families out there. Lin’s mother, Shirley, is described as a "Tiger Mom" who has a sense of humor. Her dedication to her son’s participation in basketball is cast as a redirection of the intensity that other Chinese moms would normally direct toward homework.

The downplaying of institutional racism or the pervasiveness of racist ideas about Asian Americans will continue if the media persists in telling this story as one of an underdog who triumphs. The focus on the individual also makes racism an individual act, an aberrant illogical moment, rather than part of an institutional set of practices that remains unchanged. For all the media attention Lin has received, less attention has been paid to the long history of Asian-American basketball leagues (see Jamilah King’s piece, "The Asian American Basketball Leagues that Helped Create Linsanity").

Lin has been compared to Tim Tebow, a football player famously noted for his Christian faith. What is also missing is a discussion of Asian-American Christians and how Lin connects his playing to his particular Asian-American Christian faith (see Jane Iwamura’s piece, "Lintertainment? Ethno-religious Linsight? Let’s Say Both").

The idea that Lin seems to have come out of nowhere is true only in so far as the history and culture of Asian Americans have remained invisible in a white-dominated society. There are many Asian Americans who have been following Lin’s career since his Palo Alto High School days in which he led his team to the California Division II championship. These stories and issues have always been visible and alive to us. And just because we should be critical of the terms of Lin’s visibility, we must also question through whose perspectives and lenses we are asked to see.