Mina Kimes
Mina Kimes is a sports journalist. The child of Korean and white parents, she is a senior writer at ESPN; an analyst on NFL Live, a daily hour-long TV show on ESPN; and the host of The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny, a podcast about the NFL. She is also a contributor to SportsCenter, Around the Horn, Get Up, First Take, Debatable, and the ESPN Daily podcast. The New York Post called her “the first successful major NFL TV studio analyst who never played, coached, or was in a front office.”
(via)
(via)
“[My mom] is not your stereotypical tiger mom in a number of ways, but one of the ways is that she’s always, my whole life, put Korean role models or Koreans who succeed in untraditional fields in front of me. She sends me articles about athletes, actors, musicians.... She’ll send me the article and she always says the same thing: “Such a small country, such a great people, achieving so much.”
- From an interview on The Dave Chang Show, May 2019
With her brother and mother (via)
With her father and brother (via)
“I have a Korean flag tattoo on my shoulder.… I was at a wedding with a bunch of Koreans and a table full of ajummas saw the tattoo and they almost gave me a standing ovation. Cuz they were like, ‘You chose us! You coulda gone either way! I don’t see an American flag tattoo!’ So the bar is a lot lower for hapas.… Part of the reason I got this tattoo was because I wanted people to know I was Korean. Because when you’re half, people look at you all the time, trying to figure out what you are.”
- From an interview on The Dave Chang Show, May 2019
With her family (via)
(via)
“Going to Korea as a half-Asian is such a different experience. Yeah, people treat you like a foreigner, but they don’t really view you as betraying the culture in any way. Now, in Korea, plastic surgery is rampant and people get the double-eyelid surgery to make them look half-Asian. Like you see people walking around Seoul, especially in some of the ritzier neighborhoods, with eyes like me because it’s such a common procedure there – it’s almost fetishized to look that way. So I think my experience of the country is probably really different from yours.”
- From an interview on The Dave Chang Show, May 2019
With her brother (via)
With her mother (via)
“I can relate to the notion of feeling more Korean than ever when I encountered racism – not towards me, because I don’t really get that, but when people would say things to my mom. I remember my soccer team going to a Pizza Hut when I was nine. And there was a thing kids used to do in school where they would pretend to be Asian people and pull their eyes back and there was a weird little game. And I remember they were doing that and my mom was there and I was like, “Man, I’m a nine-year-old girl and I’m about to punch these --” I was so angry with them. And I think sometimes it’s not until you’re attacked or challenged or feel that “Oh, I’m not the insider, I’m the outsider here” that you start to relate that side of your culture.”
- From an interview on The Dave Chang Show, May 2019
With her NFL Live team (via)
Filling in on Pardon the Interruption (via)