Quick Thoughts on the Rooney Rule
I wanted to highlight a piece in The Washington Post from earlier this month. It’s a part of the paper’s “Black Out” series, on why the NFL has not made more progress in hiring Black coaches. This piece, by Gus Garcia-Roberts, specifically focuses on the “Rooney Rule,” which was adopted in 2002 to encourage teams to interview Black candidates for vacant head coaching positions.
The piece is definitely worth reading in full, but I wanted to highlight two quick things about it:
First, the central premise of the piece is that the Rooney Rule, despite failing to meaningfully increase the number of Black head coaches, has caught on in corporate America, specifically in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020. According to the Post, the Rooney Rule has been mentioned 268 times in SEC filings since the murder of George Floyd, despite being mentioned only a few dozen times in the decade prior. You even haven supposedly progressive figures like Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio touting the rule as the way to fix the lack of diversity in various institutions.
This in spite of the fact that, again, the Rooney Rule has not worked. The story suggests that this failure is due to insufficient commitment to the rule. Indeed, many progressives and diversity specialists quoted by Garcia-Roberts insist that the Rooney Rule is “only a tool” and requires certain changes in corporate culture, or compliance mechanisms, to be effective.
But I would suggest that the reason for corporate America’s recent fixation on the Rooney Rule is precisely BECAUSE it has not worked. The Rooney Rule is the kind of face-saving measure you take if you want the appearance of change without actually doing anything. Indeed, the fact that you can always blame the Rooney Rule’s failure on “culture” or “insufficient commitment” makes it especially useful; as the NFL has shown, any time in the future that you face similar criticisms for lack of diversity, you can just slightly adjust the rule, and say that will fix everything.
The way we know this rule is designed to fail is the story of its origins. As the Post documents, the Rooney Rule was really just a watered down version of the proposal submitted by the litigation team that brought up the issue of diversity in 2002. Which brings me to my second point: Do not trust any rule that emanates from owners themselves!
Ownership has no real interest in diversifying the ranks of NFL coaches (or any high-profile positions, for that matter); they want to preserve their power to hire and fire people at will. The reason the Rooney Rule was doomed to fail was that it preserved that power. As I wrote in the wake of the Flores lawsuit, any rule that preserves that power can be easily gamed, since there is no objective, merit-based criteria to determine if Black candidates are being considered on equal footing.
If you want to ensure that Black coaches get hired, then you have to take power away from ownership. The Rooney Rule doesn’t do that, which explains why both corporate America and liberals like Obama and De Blasio tout it, despite its failure to produce meaningful change: Non-socialist liberals are committed to the idea that they can fix the entrenched hierarchies of capitalism while somehow preserving capitalism. If we have failed to do that, it must be because we aren’t sufficiently “committed” to it, and so we just need to keep fiddling with the rules and the “culture.”
But this is nonsense. Culture is downstream of material systems. If you want to change who gets hired, then you have to change who does the hiring.