OT: Forged in Fire, featuring a current Michigan Student

Speaking of self image, being that you don't even know the OP, you might want to stop giving unsolicited, bad take advice on the internet.

At least we got the worst post of the day out of the way early today.

Rooting for someone with whom you have a shared connection/association is not uncommon or bad.  Like, say, pulling for him because he went to Michigan and you did too, which was the main part of the OP.

I also never realized the importance of being able to see yourself represented until my hockey-playing daughter met the US Women's Olympic hockey team and watched them play.  She always loved hockey, but seeing the women playing at such a high level was very powerful for her.  She was able to connect with them and see that she too might someday play at a high level (with lots of work, coaching and luck).

dude ....... what in the actual fuck are you talking about?

i don't think you know what racist means.

there's literally nothing wrong with a minority wanting to see more minorities represented on TV, movies, radio etc. there's also nothing wrong with an asian person referring to themselves as "oriental" (god i hated typing that ... forgive me andrew and any other asians on this blog). 

Explain the racist part of having ethnic pride. 

As another Asian-American, you're picking a really ducking odd hill to die on.

I have an adopted brown daughter (my wife and I are white). I have learned an incredible lot watching and listening to her. Your comment is so breezy and vapid that it's almost not worth responding to, but since I signed in to respond to Andrew I will place my comment here: I hear you, Andrew. 

When it came time to enroll my daughter in school, thirteen years ago, we had a dilemma--the school she was zoned for had received a C grade that spring, and also looked problematic to us. It was one of those not-so-uncommon American schools with a white middle class population and a poor Black one. The white kids (generally) traipsed in one door to the fast-track classes while the Black kids tended to languish. We worried that our VERY shy brown daughter was going to get lost in the mix. (Lots to say about all this, of course, but I'll leave it at that.) 

So we sent her to the fairly upper crust local private school, pretty darned white, that a lot of our fellow academics were sending their kids to, and for a while, she flourished. But--here's where R2D2 and his breezy assertion, above, comes in. When we asked her for five years running who her favorite teachers were, what did she say? The one Black teacher and the Black gym teacher. 

What did her white father think this meant? The same thing that all of her questions about race meant: that in a very white world, she was feeling challenged to figure it all out. That places with little or no Black or other racial representation, however white or liberal, were problematic--that she was looking for people like her. That it f*cking mattered, in a way that might not have been obvious to me or R2D2. Eventually, in fact, my daughter wanted out of the place, and we were able to successfully move her into the local IB prep junior high, where she openly expressed her love for the fact that there were people who 'look like me' around her.

If R2D2 thinks my daughter's a racist, pretty obviously, he's an idiot. In fact, there's an assumption buried in his breezy, presumptuous white people 'advice' to Andrew that's worth noting--namely, the idea that people should just give up their difference on the way to some homogeneous (to me fucking lifeless) melanin-challenged world where the standard is R2D2's. No, R2D2, this time for this sh*t has passed. New world coming whether you and yours like it or not. Stop lecturing people about what they should see or feel, how they should conform to your bullsh*t. 

Andrew, I know you can speak for yourself--you did so quite ably above. I yield the floor to you and to everyone else. 

Wow!

Jarrett Irons maybe?