NFL
By: Zachary Draves
Maya Angelou said it best “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
In the case of former Las Vegas Raiders Head Coach Jon Gruden, his emails showed us who he was.
After a series of racist, sexist, and homophobic emails surfaced dating all the way back to 2011, Gruden stepped down as head coach.
The emails, which were part of an ongoing investigation into the culture of sexual harassment involving the Washington Football Team, reveal a man who’s not only comfortable in expressing his bigotry and toxic manhood but also that of his powerful friends in the NFL hierarchy who went along with it.
He used a racist trope to describe NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith, exchanged pictures of topless NFL cheerleaders, used a homophobic slur in describing NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, called for former Carolina Panthers wide receiver Eric Reid to be fired for protesting racism during the national anthem, said he doesn’t want “queers” to be drafted, and mocked safety protocols put in place to mitigate concussions (even though as head coach that was job).
All this while he was a commentator for Monday Night Football on ESPN.
So while he wasn’t directly working for the NFL during this period, he was very much working in concert with them.
These emails don’t just reveal the toxicity of Gruden but also the clear institutional racism that has come to define the NFL, a league where 70% of the players are black and the coaching staff, ownership, and executives are overwhelmingly white.
The fact that Gruden was allowed to go about as he pleased to ultimately returning as head coach while Colin Kaepernick was driven out due to his courageous protest against racial injustice and police brutality should give us a window into how the power structure of the NFL thinks and acts.
In other words, the sentiments expressed by Gruden in the emails are shared by a majority of the major NFL stakeholders.
After all, they were some of the biggest contributors to the twice impeached birther in chief who echoed their sensibilities from the ultimate bully pulpit.
It is a truth to say that there was collusion to keep Kaepernick out of the league as a means of reinforcing and enhancing a profit-driven white power dynamic where the black laborers on the field is to be seen and not heard.
All this comes at a time when the NFL is engaged in routine window dressing to try to be anti-racist through mundane public statements and underutilized initiatives that talk a good game but don’t rid the rot of guys like Jon Gruden or the fact that for years they have concealed their race norming practices that have denied black players their just due in the form of concussion settlements.
If the NFL truly wants to reckon with hundreds of years of institutional racism in America, they would use this moment to halt the touchy-feely BSAs and actually look in the mirror because the worst is yet to come as more emails will be released.
From here on out, it is likely we will get a sense of how much this league has gone to insurmountable lengths to provide cover for those who quietly enable their regularized bigotry.
The NFL better gets its act together otherwise they are useless.
Jon Gruden is just one of their many Frankenstein Monsters that need to be destroyed.
