Following the United State’s racial reckoning of 2020, most of us have become all too familiar with promises of more diversity in the workplace and boosting representation. Now a year and a half removed from these claims, it’s sad, but not surprising, to see that few entities have made good on these promises.
The NFL is one group that made promises to improve diversity and inclusion following the Black Lives Matter movement. However, while they claimed to have empowered their Black players by branding anti-racist messages on their fields and helmets (pending approval), recent events have proved otherwise.
On Feb. 1, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a class-action lawsuit against the NFL and its teams, claiming discrimination in hiring practices and unequal opportunity and pay for Black coaches in the league. One of the key reasons behind the lawsuit was the nature of Flores’s departure from the Dolphins.
Flores was fired from Miami despite having a winning record and backing from his players. This is not uncommon in the NFL as statistics have shown that while Black coaches on average have won more games per season and led their teams to the playoffs 67% of the time compared to the 39% for White coaches, they are still more likely to be fired than White coaches with inferior records.
Prior to his untimely firing from the Miami job, Flores was also one of the only three Black head coaches in the NFL, a league that is made up of majority Black players. This stark contrast between the racial makeup in NFL coaching and ownership versus their players has also not gone unnoticed in recent years.
In his lawsuit, Flores voiced that the NFL is “managed like a plantation,” explaining that, while everyone involved benefits from wealth, it’s easy to see the racial segregation as the league is 70% Black with 100% White ownership. Flores then goes on to further explain that the racial divide reduces Black members of the league to only being players who produce wins and make revenue for teams despite many being intellectually capable and having the proper acumen to work coaching and front office jobs. This dynamic both limits player empowerment and makes it more difficult for Black coaches to break through into positions of leadership in the NFL.
The NFL has attempted to rectify these issues of front-office and coaching diversity in the past with moves such as the Rooney Rule. The Rooney Rule is a diversity quota that states each organization must interview at least one minority candidate each time they make a new coaching hire. This rule was enacted back in 2002, as civil rights lawyers studies showed Black coaches were being unjustly fired at higher rates than their White colleagues and also seeing disproportionately fewer opportunities to interview for those positions.
However, as Flores reiterated in his lawsuit, this rule makes no promises of actually hiring minority candidates and feels as if the team is just checking off a box with no guarantee of boosted diversity.
The answer here is simple: More Black head coaches need to be hired at all levels, not just interviewed. There is no lack of evidence that shows players in both college football and the NFL benefit from Black leadership, and countless players have sounded off on the pros of Black head coaches.
When asked about the impact of Black coaches, NFL Defensive tackle Ethan Westbrook claimed “It’s just important to have black coaches, and it’s just a different element. Some coaches come from where you come from, and they have a better understanding of where you come from…Black coaches give you a different aspect that you can connect to, they give you an outlook on how black men are perceived when you get older, and that’s important. Just being able to relate to them is important.”
However, despite these player testaments and proven statistics, the NFL’s efforts to make up for its lack of Black head coaches have fallen flat. Making it progressively clearer that promises of inclusion and diversity quotas simply don’t work.
Even beyond the football field, industries that have implemented Rooney Rule like diversity quotas are seeing similar results. Many tech giants have adopted this practice and have seen little actual improvement in diversity since the enactment. Amazon, for example, began using the Rooney Rule in their head office back in 2018, but only saw an addition of one Black board member and its senior leadership remained just 3.8% Black. So, while the job candidates become more diverse there is still no indication that these companies are making any efforts to hire the Black individuals that they are forced to interview.
As many often say, sports are a microcosm of the real world, and this lawsuit proves it. Like so many other instances of discrimination in the professional field, Black coaches must work twice as hard to be recognized and face twice as much scrutiny as their White counterparts. When it comes to ending racism in both our society and the NFL, it still feels like after every step toward inclusion, we are forced two steps back.
While Flores’s actions were brave and necessary to shed light on the decades of racist hiring practices in the NFL, this move has likely ended any future possibilities of him coaching in the league. As we have seen from the previous treatment of individuals who go against the league to call out racial injustice, such as former quarterback Colin Kapernick, Flores will presumably be blackballed by the NFL.
With this lawsuit, other large organizations should take notice. Enacting diversity quotas does not guarantee boosted diversity, and promises of inclusion mean nothing without real action. Hiring discrimination against Black people occurs throughout the professional field, not just in the NFL. We can only hope the public nature of this discrimination lawsuit inspires action on fixing these practices across our society as both history and these recent events have made it increasingly clear that we cannot continue to trust White organizations to share their power.
