DazedandConfused Posted July 2, 2009 Posted July 2, 2009 I just got an e-mail from a family member about an effort which is apparently going on on Capitol Hill to get elected officials to employ something like the Rooney Rule and require members of Congress to at least interview one person of color for chief of staff or high level committee jobs in Congress. The thought behind this that like the NFL the racial breakdown of office chiefs of staff and Congressional committee directors does not correspond at all to the statiscal make-up of the society from which candidates for these jobs come from. I think this statistical analysis is true (though there is a difference between the statistical breakdown and whether discrimination based on race occurred in a particular case). The e-mail stated that prior to the Rooney rule 6% of NFL HCs were of African-American descent. The Rooney rule only required an affirmative action for increased people of color hiring and specifically did not require meeting a specific quota or force anyone to hire any specific candidates. It mandated an affirmative action of team owners that they give at least one serious interview to an A-A for any HC job. The results have cioincided with some statistical change. The e-mail said 22% of NFL HCs today are of A-A descent. While these results do easily exceed the % of A-As in society they also fall well short of the % of NFL players who are of A-A descent (former NFL players are far from the only source of HCs nor does being a former NFL player guarantee an SB win or even an appearance (see Dick Jauron if you want evidence of this fact) however, clearly former players are a significant contributor to the pool of HC candidates and clearly given the large proporton of A-A players not having many or any HCs be of A-A descent is simply going to be an issue in real life. Quite logically I would say that the significant increase in HCs of A-A descent has actually improved the quality of the candidate pool for HCs. For the first time we saw both SB teams coached by people of A-A descent and the even better thing was that while this was noted it was not a huge thing. It seems pretty clear to me that in this case without mandating a draconian rule which mandated an arbitrary dictate of minority hiring, the NFL has been forth right in addressing this issue (the fine against that idiot Matt Millen because he did not even pretend to follow the Rooney Rule struck me as a nice job of requiring its own membership to follow its own agreement. My sense is that Matt Millen is a failure not because of racism, but he engaged in racist practices because he is an idiot. The NFL took a stance for the rule of order over the rule of personality and that helped. It will be interesting to see if Congress can use a Rooney rule esque application of affirmative action to its own hiring and produce a similar quantitative change and at least have a reasonable argument as to whether they got the same qualitative result. The numbers were interesting as apparently despite there being over 20 members of the House A-A caucus only 5 or so members of the House have Chief of staffs of A-a descent. There are a couple of A-As chief of staffs in the Senate though as far as I know the almost universally agreed to be a idiot Rolland Burris is the only A-A senator (I may be wrong about this so please correct me if have the numbers messed up). IMHO while I think it would be stupid and anti-merit to have a quota of minority hires, I am very impressed with how the Rooney rule has worked in the NFL. It has resulted in greater achievement of a meritocracy as under the old systen NFL owners simply seem motivated by some weird Jimmy the Greek style views of their own prejudices about who had what it takes to be a leading light in some NFL job. The utter mandate to do some more fair interviewing was teamed with a policy that filled the pipeline with future candidates by funding and promoting minority internships for very junior coaches and using that idiot Millen who was not even smart enough to pretend to give interviews resulted in a stupid attitude being brushed aside by reality. Kudos to the NFL IMHO.
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