By Matthew Delaney
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
We’ve done it. We’ve completed our six-decade mission to right the wrongs of slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of discrimination toward black Americans. Our genius solution? Just apply affirmative action everywhere in life.
That’s exactly what Brian Flores is trying to do by suing the NFL.
The ex-Miami Dolphins head coach alleges that the league engaged in hiring practices that violate Civil Rights law, specifically for hiring white coaches while setting up “sham” interviews with black coaches to satisfy the NFL’s pro-diversity Rooney Rule.
Flores’ smoking gun are texts he shared from famed coach Bill Belichick congratulating him on becoming the New York Giants’ next head coach. The only problem was that Belichick texted the wrong Brian — he meant to text Brian Daboll, the (white) man who ultimately got the job. Flores had a few more days before he was supposed to interview with the Giants.
So, we’re supposed to think it’s normal that Flores didn’t mention this when he met with the Giants, and it’s just as normal for him to go straight to court? We’re also supposed to assume he wants to dismantle the NFL’s systemically racist corporate ladder out of the goodness of his heart and not for some personal motive?
I’m not even sure Flores believes that. He’s upset because he wanted to be the token black guy that got hired. He didn’t want to be the token black guy that the Giants used to check a box for the NFL bureaucracy. His blackness made him feel cheap, so now he’s showing how much his blackness empowers him by playing the race card against the league.
A saner society would be able to learn the proper lesson at this moment: Diversity quotas are inherently bad because they’re reductive. They reduce the quality of candidates in a job search because they reduce a person’s worth down to their skin color.
It’s the same reason why people are getting worked up over President Joe Biden’s upcoming Supreme Court nominee. Not only is Biden telling us he’s not looking for quality, but he’s also saying that the newest person on our nation’s highest court has to be an intersectional clone rubber stamped by the DNC. We’ve already seen how great that strategy is working out with our first Indian-Asian-Black-Female Vice President.
Obviously, we are not a sane society. We’re the kind whose journalists cheer on Flores while he pursues his goal of enforcing more tokenization in the NFL. It’s a society where even right-wingers say the NFL upholds a racist system via a good Ol’ boys club of nepotism and preference for the whites. Flores’ lawsuit intends to cure that.
Call it equity. Call it Critical Race Theory. Call it whatever. They all perform the same function as affirmative action — over-correct a wrong so aggressively that it (intentionally) divides us. The left wants to corrupt the NFL with this practice because of how sacred the institution is.
As Jason Whitlock has said, the league symbolizes the masculine tentpoles of our culture. So, activists in the media went after that image of manhood by revealing the NFL’s domestic violence issues. We associate the game of football with love of country and military, so again, journalists reframed the NFL’s patriotism as racism because it didn’t celebrate Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem protests.
Unfortunately, these have been successful efforts. Stickers like “Stop Hate” and “End Racism” and the ever-beloved “Black Lives Matter” adorn players’ helmets. The NFL was right to address its domestic violence problem, but then watched as the media fused it with the concussion issue and essentially labeled every player as a risk to women. Worse yet, the league was one of the first businesses with a vaccine mandate, leading the way for other major corporations to cave to the Covid-19 hysteria.
Despite all that, the NFL still maintains its position as the ultimate meritocracy. It embodies hard work, self-determination, and the American Dream in a way few other things can. This is also why it can’t be tolerated. Now, useful idiot Flores wants to convince us that the NFL — with 70% of its players black — is not actually fair or a net good for black Americans because it has too many white coaches.
I doubt this will stick. Everyone’s already on guard about left-wing overreach from the pandemic. I don’t think the public appetite is quite there for another progressive makeover of something that will inevitably make it shittier (*cough* Hollywood *cough* journalism *cough* academia).
This episode tells us a lot about how the left operates. Namely, how it seeks to hollow out and assume control of institutions so it can play kingmaker. Leftists want to pick winners and losers based on ideological loyalty. They want to choose who succeeds, not let people dignify themselves by earning it. They’ve already decreed merit as racist. What better way to demonstrate that than forcing affirmative action on the meritocratic NFL, all under the banner of social justice?
This is something that Flores — and everyone in favor of his lawsuit — should think about. Yes, they’re arguing for race-biased practices that rob the public of a quality product. But more so, they’re arguing that black people don’t have the skills or the wits to compete without a helping hand. Black people need to be chosen for success; they can’t earn it.
The saddest part about this whole saga is that Flores can coach. He over-achieved in Miami after being dealt crappy rosters for the past three years. He was going to get another shot at running a team and had a real chance to be a winner. He earned that.
But Flores decided to torch his NFL career because he carries the one trait from our old, racist history we can’t shake: that black people are somehow inferior. The only difference is it’s now our fellow black Americans propagating it.
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