Bomani Jones on Lack of Black Owners, Coaches in the NFL: ‘The Cycle Is Very Similar to the Voting Rights Act Cycle’

EXCERPT:

JONES: "Well, I think the cycle is very similar to the Voting Rights Act cycle, which is, you look up and you think things are good enough to where, hey, we don’t need to pay that much attention to these safeguards that we have in place to make sure fairness is there, we can just throw that out, people have gotten better. And the next thing you know, you look up and everything is what it was before. It's the same thing we saw with affirmative action in education. That's the point that you get to. So, when the Rooney rule first came in, they should really call it the Johnny Cochran rule because they were afraid that Johnny Cochran would take them to court, and there ain't nothing scared white people at that time more than the idea that Johnny Cochran was going to take you to court, he was a magician, right? But they put the rule in, and then once they did put that rule in, you saw a lot of black coaches get hired. You saw some changes happen. Then after a while, gradually, people stopped thinking this is an issue, it slows down, it slows down, then you look up and it is two. And then people look up and say, 'Hey, man, it is only two.' It's like, 'Oh, I guess we got to do something about that.' But the individual owners don’t necessarily want to have to be the one to do this, they want to hire the guy that they wanted to. I say all that to say, unless somebody’s going to take them to court, I don’t feel like they will be truly dedicated to fixing the problem, but I do think that right now, when you look at the ranks, it does look better than than it did just a couple of years ago when it was only two coaches."