Making rules that favor one group over another for a position is racist. If you can't see that, you'll not be able to add anything constructive to this conversation.
The idea is to create a climate of equal opportunity, not enforcing equal outcome. Look at some of my other posts in this thread. There are ways to achieve this without enacting racist policies.
You probably shouldn’t talk about who is adding anything constructive to the conversation if you can’t even stick with widely accepted meanings of words because they don’t line up with your feelings.
Making rules that favor people based on race is not inherently racist. You have to look at intention and reasoning. The Rooney Rule is literally a rule that benefits some races over others because it mandates minorities definitely get an interview while whites people don’t necessarily have to. That’s mostly because that particular branch positions has longstanding history of boxing people out and mostly benefiting those who are well connected or related and that usually extrapolates to “some white people have their foot in the door for these roles and minorities who didn’t come up being related to these guys or close to these guys don’t”. So they mandate teams give some consideration to a minority candidate so they aren’t blindly going with some preordained person with no other consideration.
Even this rule, it’s not even forcing anyone’s hand. The Rooney Rule actually mandates action. This is an incentive that quite frankly most teams won’t take because a head coach or GM is infinitely more valuable than moving up a few draft spots (see all the bottom feeders with good picks every year).
Saying “listen minorities are traditionally shut out of these roles, we’d like to fix that, so we are offering an incentive if you do hire a minority” is not inherently racist. It’s recognizing an existing problem and giving benefits for people who take action to help with it. It doesn’t make anyone do anything. If anything the current nepotism and well connected people that keep getting these opportunities are still wildly benefiting white people. Whether it’s giving a Shanahan or Ryan an opportunity to play nice with their dads.... this is adding a benefit the other way.
It would be racist if everything was equal and this was just an attempt to give someone an advantage. However the rationale behind this is that certain people already have an inherent advantage so we are making up the gap by adding our own to equalize it.
Is this the perfect way to do it? No. Anything like this is going to be difficult. It’s also far from the worst thing they could propose either. Trust me I know. There’s plenty of companies that do a wink wink “hey we only have white guys in here, try to hire a woman or minority with the next open position”.
And like I said before, it would be one thing if people were losing their minds over the current structure that is inherently unfair already. However, they aren’t. So now an imperfect action to correct an already imperfect system is being called racist because it might give a minority who traditionally was blocked out from a job a better chance at landing it
