The End of “END RACISM” in the End Zone

Racism has ended! Have you heard? Or maybe ending racism has ended. On Tuesday, it was reported that the N.F.L. would switch one of the slogans stencilled on the edge of the end zone during Super Bowl LIX from “END RACISM” to “CHOOSE LOVE.” It will be the first time in five seasons that the “END RACISM” tagline will not be featured on an end zone during the championship game. The new phrase, according to the league spokesperson Brian McCarthy, was “appropriate,” given the “wild fires in Southern California, the terrorist attack here in New Orleans, the plane and helicopter crash near our nation’s capital and the plane crash in Philadelphia”—all tragedies that would have been most appropriately addressed by more people choosing love, obviously. It was also announced on Tuesday that Donald Trump would be attending the Super Bowl, which will take place tonight, in New Orleans. The league has denied that the timing of the decision to change the slogan had anything to do with Trump’s visit. Surely it is a coincidence and has nothing to do with, say, Elon Musk demanding a retraction of all woke football fields.

The “END RACISM” inscriptions were silly from the start. (It was an especially odd bit of fine print when it appeared above the word “Chiefs,” a team name that many Native Americans find offensive, in the end zone.) The slogan was part of the Inspire Change initiative that the N.F.L. launched in 2019, more than two years after Colin Kaepernick, who was then the San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback, began kneeling during the national anthem in protest of racial injustice and police brutality. Kaepernick, by then, was out of the league; his stand had made him radioactive. Then George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, in 2020, and the N.F.L. broadened its efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. Some of the programs involved real money: since its rollout, the Inspire Change initiative has distributed at least three hundred million dollars to local nonprofits and other organizations working on social-justice issues in underserved communities, according to the league. (The total valuation of N.F.L. teams increased by more than a hundred and twenty billion dollars in the same period.) Other efforts involved virtue signalling: helmet decals, Instagram posts, commercials. That’s when the league started plastering “END RACISM” and other vague inspirational phrases—“IT TAKES ALL OF US,” “STOP HATE, “ “CHOOSE LOVE,” and “VOTE”—on the back of the fields.

None of these acts were particularly provocative. (It takes all of us to do what, exactly?) Nor were they surprising. After the nationwide protests following Floyd’s death, many companies took measures to institute policies to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. What was a little surprising is that some of those companies looked to the N.F.L., of all places, as a model. The league’s most prominent D.E.I. policy is known as the Rooney Rule, named after the former Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, who was the driving force behind it. The rule was established in 2003, after two well-respected Black coaches with winning records (and playoff appearances) were both fired. Before then, there had never been more than three Black head coaches in the league at a time, and a labor economist produced a report showing that, taken together, the five (five!) Black head coaches during the modern era had outperformed their white counterparts, but were still more likely to lose their jobs. The rule didn’t dictate hiring decisions, but it required clubs to interview at least one minority candidate before choosing a head coach.

The N.F.L. wasn’t the first corporation to try to promote diversity by encouraging a broader pool of candidates, but the Rooney Rule quickly became synonymous with the idea of the diverse-candidate slate. Barack Obama touted it when he was President. A few years ago, the New York City Comptroller encouraged fifty-six companies to adopt it. And a Washington Post investigation found that entities ranging from Lyft to the State of Oregon cited the Rooney Rule as an inspiration for their own policies to promote diverse candidate pools.

But that was before the Trump Administration blamed D.E.I. for everything from the California wildfires to the fatal plane crash in Washington, D.C. (So much for choosing love.) Among Trump’s first acts in office was to issue an executive order requiring federal employees working in D.E.I. programs to be placed on paid leave and describing diversity programs in the private sector as “illegal.” Under pressure, Google, Meta, Walmart, Target, and scores of other companies have apparently curtailed their D.E.I. efforts or abandoned them altogether.

Who would have been shocked if the N.F.L. had announced it was doing the same? Ending racism, after all, is over. The political leanings and donations of the teams’ owners skew Republican. Trump is attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Gayle Benson, the New Orleans Saints’ owner. The N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, describes his job as “protecting the shield”—in other words, absorbing or avoiding controversy on behalf of billionaire team owners. And, last year, America First Legal, a nonprofit founded by the longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller, filed a lawsuit against the N.F.L. alleging that the Rooney Rule is racist and illegal.

Instead, this past Monday, Goodell made it clear during a press conference that the N.F.L. was committed to its diversity measures, and defended the Rooney Rule in particular. “We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League, and we’re going to continue those efforts, because we’ve not only convinced ourselves, I think we’ve proven ourselves, that it does make the N.F.L. better,” he said. “We’re not in this because it’s a trend to get in or a trend to get out of it. Our efforts are fundamental in trying to attract the best possible talent into the National Football League both on and off the field.” Goodell’s words made headlines. Is Roger S. Goodell—the son of a Republican congressman from Chautauqua County, New York, a man partial to quarter-zip sweaters—actually an agent for radical wokeness? Is he a man of conscience, as his father had been when he stood up to Richard Nixon and opposed the Vietnam War? Or is Goodell the opposite, a protector of the powerful, who erased the word “racism” in order to appease Trump? And do the diversity efforts actually make the N.F.L. better?

On some level, the league’s D.E.I. efforts make obvious sense. The N.F.L.’s response to Kaepernick was a fiasco. The league is dominated by Black players, many of whom have sizable followings; it would make sense that the league would want to signal some concern for their well-being and their communities, whether or not that concern is genuine or cynical. (Concern for their physical health, of course, is another story.) But there are also ways to measure some of the impacts, and the results are, at best, mixed, particularly if the focus is on the Rooney Rule. (Maybe the “Stop Hate” helmet decals had a huge impact. Hard to say.) In 2003, when the rule was implemented, the N.F.L. had three Black head coaches; in 2022, it had only three. An investigation by the Washington Post that year found that qualified Black coaches were often passed over, given sham interviews, and were more likely to be fired even when they were successful. That same year, Brian Flores, who had just been fired by the Miami Dolphins despite finishing with a winning record, filed a lawsuit against the league alleging racial discrimination. He presented damning evidence that teams were circumventing the Rooney Rule, including text messages accidentally sent by Bill Belichick indicating that the New York Giants had decided to hire Brian Daboll, who is white, days before they interviewed Flores, who is Black, for their head-coaching vacancy. (Much of the lawsuit is still in N.F.L. arbitration. The league has called the claims “without merit.”)

Diversity-checkbox interviews have been a problem from the start. Part of the appeal of the Rooney Rule was its simplicity, but also, for owners, its lack of accountability. For years, there were no hiring quotas, no carrots, no real sticks. DeMaurice Smith, the former head of the N.F.L. Players Association, used to refer to it as the “Rooney Suggestion.” The optics were good: the policy allowed owners to appear enlightened, while still empowering them to choose the man they were going to choose anyway. It’s telling that the rule is named after Rooney, a rich white owner, and not, for example, Fritz Pollard, the league’s first Black head coach. Only one team has been fined for obvious abuses—the Detroit Lions, for two hundred thousand dollars—and many haven’t suffered any consequences at all, even, in at least one case, when the owner more or less admitted that the minority candidates had very little chance. Violations are easy to see but hard to prove. Hiring is subjective; who could prove which factors predominated?

The lack of diversity in coaching’s lower ranks has made it easier for teams to justify continuing to hire candidates with familiar backgrounds. Throughout the years, the league has expanded and strengthened the Rooney Rule, in addition to introducing some incentives for following it in good faith. Teams are now required to interview two minority or female candidates for all head-coach, general-manager, and coördinator positions, along with one minority or female candidate for quarterbacks coach; teams whose coördinators of color are hired away as head coaches or general managers are given compensatory draft picks. The league also claims to track the seriousness of interviews, and has introduced other measures to expand the pipeline, including a leadership-development program for women and minorities.

Some of the measures, at least, seemed to be making a difference. Last year, around forty-four per cent of all coaches in the league were people of color, and on seven teams that figure was more than fifty per cent, according to analysis by USA Today. Several teams had multiple coördinators who were people of color, and nine of the thirty-two teams had minority head coaches at the start of this season. But, for the first time in more than three decades, there were zero Black offensive coördinators—the position that provides the biggest springboard into head coaching. In October, the New York Jets fired Robert Saleh, who is of Lebanese descent, and the New England Patriots and Oakland Raiders both fired their Black head coaches last month. During this year’s hiring cycle, five of the six head coaches hired so far have been white. (The New Orleans Saints have yet to announce their choice.) The Dallas Cowboys’ new head coach, Brian Schottenheimer, does not have any prior experience leading a team, but his father, Marty, was a legendary coach who won two hundred regular-season games.

The N.F.L., for all its popularity, is intensely insular. It likes to refer to itself as a family, and coaching trees—networks of assistants and protégés—can resemble real family trees. Nepotism is not the only reason. No one thinks that Kyle Shanahan only has his job as coach of the San Francisco 49ers because his father, Mike, was the coach of the Denver Broncos. Kyle certainly had advantages, both relational and educational. But Mike was a genius, and Kyle is a genius.

One of Kyle’s strengths seems to be in identifying talent wherever he can find it. The 49ers have been among the most successful teams in recent years, and also among the most diverse. Several members of the coach’s staff have been hired for head-coach or general-manager positions since 2020. He also hired the first woman and first openly gay coach in the league, Katie Sowers. The team saw direct gains from developing those minority coaches and executives, receiving eight third-round draft picks in compensation for other teams poaching staff from them. (The team did have to backtrack in January when it tried to promote an assistant to the offensive-coördinator position without conducting an open search first.) But, if the 49ers’ long run, at least until last season, is any indication, the team also seemingly benefitted from the culture that empowered its people to succeed. Hiring policies, after all, can only do so much in environments that are hostile to or wary of difference.

What might a broader cultural shift toward inclusion in the N.F.L. look like? It’s actually not so hard to imagine, because there’s been a huge one in recent years on the field, if not on the sidelines. It used to be that quarterbacks were, by default, white. Black players were not considered smart enough for such an intellectually demanding position. I’m not talking about some bygone racist past; I’m talking seven to ten years ago. The New York Giants had never started a Black quarterback before 2017. When the Baltimore Ravens’ quarterback Lamar Jackson was in college, a coach wanted him to return punts at practice. Black quarterbacks had never faced each other in a Super Bowl until Patrick Mahomes, of the Kansas City Chiefs, faced Jalen Hurts, of the Philadelphia Eagles, two years ago. Now the two men are matched up again, and the racial element is old news. At the start of this season, fifteen of the league’s thirty-two starting quarterbacks were Black, an N.F.L. record.

The culture changed not because Goodell said it should, or because teams were trying to remediate the legacy of slavery, but because some Black quarterbacks are extremely good. And there are downstream effects: more Black kids will watch Mahomes and Hurts this evening and dream of leading a team, instead of seeing themselves as relegated to less exalted roles. Will the head-coaching position follow suit? Maybe. It stands to reason that more top Black quarterbacks today might become top Black coaches in the future, having already shown their leadership and intellectual skills. It might mean that more people in a football organization will be quicker to recognize the insights and innovations produced by Black minds on the sidelines now that they are more alert to the creativity and intelligence of Black players on the gridiron. It may become easier, too, to discern the ways different coaches, like different quarterbacks, are better suited for some situations than others, whatever their race. But those kinds of changes don’t just happen. And they don’t happen by fiat. They happen because people believe that the changes will ultimately help them, and if people express their faith in the outcomes.

Does it matter if Goodell talks about the benefits of diversity? Perhaps it’s naïve to think so. The expression of values is cheap if actions contradict them. But the N.F.L., at the Super Bowl, is the ultimate expression of the mainstream, and at a moment when the landscape is shifting, violently, Goodell’s comments are one small way of protecting those ideas. ♦