By msnbc.com staff
A Boston Ben & Jerry’s outlet says staff was “swept up in the nationwide Linsanity momentum” when they served a flavor named after Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin that included fortune cookie pieces.
A Facebook post Friday from the Harvard Square location read:
“On behalf of Ben & Jerry’s Boston Scoop Shops we offer a heartfelt apology if anyone was offended by our handmade Linsanity flavor that we offered at our Harvard Square location. We are proud and honored to have Jeremy Lin hail from one of our fine, local universities and we are huge sports fans,” Ben & Jerry’s officials posted on the company’s local Twitter and Facebook pages. “We were swept up in the nationwide Linsanity momentum. Our intention was to create a flavor to honor Jeremy Lin’s accomplishments and his meteoric rise in the NBA, and recognize that he was a local Harvard graduate. We try demonstrate our commitment as a Boston-based, valued-led business and if we failed in this instance we offer our sincere apologies.”
Lin has gone in the last month from being a twice-cut NBA benchwarmer to one of the biggest sports stories in the country as he led New York’s NBA team to an eight-game winning streak after finally starting. Despite a strong prep career, he was not recruited by major college basketball powers and ended up attending Harvard, where he led the basketball team and graduated with a degree in economics.
Lin is a U.S. citizen whose parents are immigrants from Taiwan. The Ben & Jerry’s incident is the latest in a string of events where companies, notably ESPN, and individual media members have apologized for references to Lin’s race.
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