Words That Anger

The Rooney Rule is a National Football League (NFL) policy that requires league teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. The rule is named after Dan Rooney, the former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and former chairman of the league’s diversity committee. Nearly 20 years after “acceptance,” only one of 27 head coaches employed in the NFL was Black, with five teams without a head coach, in a league where roughly 70% of the players are Black. That lone coach was the Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, who won the Super Bowl in 2009. There have been other non-Black minority coaches — one of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent and one of Lebanese descent; but, clearly the NFL’s racial diversity effort is not what many believe Father Rooney hoped it would be. In the end, it is just words and a continuing reminder that words that matter can be words that anger when they are ignored or, at best, responded to with tokenism, insincerity, or discounting of intent.