“Diversity” in discussions about sports coaches has become shorthand for discriminating on the basis of race, and Vincent Goodwill has done a fine job reinforcing that idea.
Goodwill wrote a piece praising the NBA for having 15 black head coaches after having six just two years ago. In it, he asserts that the league has more racial discrimination to do in hiring for other front-office positions, “but the progress in the coaching space must be noted.”
Goodwill, like many others in the sports world, is mired in a toxic obsession with race that defies all logic and reason. He says of black coaches not being hired that “the micro in every situation is sometimes justifiable,” meaning he can’t pick out any hiring decision where a black coach was robbed of a job. But “the macro picture wasn’t pretty” because all that matters is if there are enough coaches who have dark enough skin. If not, that must be proof of racism, even if every situation is “sometimes justifiable.”
A prime example of this comes when discussing the success of some black coaches. After Monty Williams and Ime Udoka led their teams to the NBA Finals the past two years, Goodwill claims that their accomplishments “should’ve at least created a copycat effect, and perhaps it has.”
Normally, when discussing the copycat effect on hiring coaches across the league, teams are copying coaching philosophies. When one philosophy results in success, other teams try to duplicate the process. Goodwill is claiming that the copycat effect that “should” be informing how teams hire coaches is skin color and skin color alone. According to him, if a black coach has success, that is proof that you should hire a black candidate.
There is no reason whatsoever to care about the racial makeup of NBA coaches. It is entirely irrelevant to the sport of basketball and the hiring processes of teams unless there is real evidence that they are discriminating in hiring. It is not “progress” to go from one racial makeup to another. Teams should not be basing their decisions on the skin color of successful coaches because skin color is not a coaching philosophy.
This noxious racialization is not going to go anywhere because sports media have taken it upon themselves to be racial activists, pushing for formal and informal racial quotas throughout the sports world. With sports leagues buying into the broken premise, the racial rot in the sports media industry will only continue to spread.
