Former NFL assistant coach Eugene Chung alleged that a team told him he’s “not the right minority” during a hiring interview this offseason. This is precisely the kind of racism the NFL has courted in racializing its hiring processes.
Chung appeared in 55 games over five seasons during his playing career as the first Korean American to be selected in the first round of the NFL draft. He went on to join the Philadelphia Eagles coaching staff in 2010 and is currently out of the NFL after his contract expired at the end of his second stint with the Eagles in 2019.
Chung alleges that during a coaching interview this offseason, he was told that he was not really a minority and not the “right minority” that the team was looking for. If true, it’s blatant racism, of course, but it’s the kind of racism that the NFL has breathed life into by feeding into the narrative that it has a racial hiring issue.
Every offseason, sports pundits lament that the NFL has a problem with racism, based on how many nonwhite head coaches there are in the league. Never mind that 32 head coach positions is far too small a sample size to make such judgments. (The league received an A+ grade for diverse hiring among assistant coaches, a far more representative metric.) The accusation explicitly calls for racial hiring, to the point that some pundits claim that firing a black coach is in and of itself racist, regardless of performance.
The NFL bent the knee to such thinking, implementing a new policy that bribes teams to hire more minorities as assistant coaches and front office personnel. If a minority is hired away from your team, you receive draft picks in return. The commodification of minority coaches is even worse than the tokenization of them under the Rooney Rule, which forced every team to interview a minority candidate for head coach vacancies and was often treated as a joke.
But, much like supposedly elite Ivy League universities, the NFL’s affirmative action was never about all minorities. The focus has always been on black coaches, an effect that was amplified during the cultural surge of Black Lives Matter last year. So Chung is a minority, just not the “right” one for an NFL team looking to fluff its racial quota numbers.
It’s not clear what exactly anyone expected. Based on a mistaken notion of discrimination, the NFL racialized its hiring processes and got more racism in return. You didn’t need a crystal ball to see this coming. It’s a shame, but this problem is one entirely of the NFL’s own making, along with the race-obsessives who pushed the NFL into embracing their unfounded narrative.
