The NFL’s racial divide, in one chart
The NFL has declared that any players kneeling during the national anthem will now be hit with a fine. Looking at the racial breakdown of the league helps understand why.
It’s striking how much bigger that pink bar for “players” is than the others.
African-American players, beginning with quarterback Colin Kaepernick, started kneeling as a way to silently protest racial discrimination and police brutality in the United States. That did not sit well with parts of the country and parts of the NFL. Donald Trump, responding to the new policy, casually suggested that kneeling players “shouldn’t be in the country.” Many team owners told players (paywall) to stop.
The new decision is a “compromise” in that it allows players to be absent for the anthem. They just can’t kneel. But that makes their silent protest even more silent. Kneeling is visible, absence is not. So it looks like a win for those on Trump’s side, who believe kneeling is unpatriotic and that NFL players are supposed to entertain us and not have opinions about anything.
The data in the chart above, collected by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES), shows that while 70% of NFL players are black, only 9% of managers in the league office are (that’s vs. 13% of Americans overall). And as for team CEOs or presidents—the ones chiefly responsible for deciding what to do about kneeling—it’s exactly 0%.
You might think that the proportion of African-Americans among NFL staff has been rising over time. It hasn’t. In fact, it was at a much higher 14% way back in 1996, according to TIDES.
The NFL is not alone in having such a discrepancy. Figures for the NBA are slightly better, but largely similar.
NFL owners have decided that kneeling will not be tolerated. But of course, as 100% wealthy white guys, police brutality and racial discrimination don’t affect them the same way as Kaepernick and his fellow African-American players.
Read next: The NFL’s new policy on the national anthem is a rejection of the modern workplace
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