White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (30 page)

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Authors: Tim Wise

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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When the first packet of information came, I have to say, I wasn’t immediately sold on the strength of Jimmy’s case. He had representation—a pretty established law firm in downtown Manhattan—but all he had for me at the time were some clippings regarding his prior coaching experience, and some publicity materials he had put together, as well as various articles about discrimination in the NFL, including one piece from
Sports Illustrated
, which detailed the difficulties that African Americans were having obtaining jobs on the sidelines. Still, and despite the paucity of hard evidence up to that point, I enjoyed talking with Jimmy and felt there might be more to the case. So I insisted that he stay in touch as his attorneys proceeded through the discovery phase of the lawsuit, and to let me know what they came up with. I would be glad to serve as an expert consultant of sorts if his lawyers thought I might be of some assistance.
Of course, I reminded Jimmy on numerous occasions that I was only twenty-three, the mere possessor of a Bachelor’s Degree, and could in no way be presumed an expert on discrimination the way many others could. So, I explained, he might want to get someone with more formal credentials to serve as an actual expert witness come time for trial. But Jimmy would have none of it. He had seen me on
Jane Whitney
and felt that I was the right person for the job. I thanked him for his confidence and promised to do all I could.
Though there would be no pay for any of the work I did over the next two years on Jimmy’s behalf, ultimately, that work would become some of the most important I’ve ever done, if not for Jimmy, then certainly for myself. Indeed, my involvement with Jimmy would ultimately serve as the best education I could have received about how racism works, specifically at the institutional level. In fact, my work on Jimmy’s case was one of the few high points during a period of my life in which most everything else was going wrong.
From mid-1992 until late 1994, my professional life would remain in constant crisis mode. We would leave Houston in September to return to New Orleans, but although I had more connections there than in Texas, I still had no luck finding activist work upon getting back. Broke, unemployed, and unable to contribute anything to the household that Nicol and I shared, I found myself desperate enough at one point to sell off my treasured baseball card collection, which I had cultivated as a youth. Although the cards were worth about thirty thousand dollars then (and, sickeningly would be worth nearly half a million dollars today), I felt as though I had no choice, ultimately letting them go for only about 15 percent of their value at the time. I also took a job in early 1993 as a stock boy at a local wine store, until finally landing a research position with economics writer and author Walter Russell Mead in June. But even during the work with Mead (for which those of us hired to assist him were paid two hundred dollars a week, and even then never on time), I was far more interested in Jimmy’s case than anything Walter had us looking up on international trade and development policy.
By mid-’93, the lawsuit was in full swing, and over the next several months, as Jimmy’s attorneys would depose the principals from the other side, they would load me up with deposition transcripts to look over, as well as internal NFL and World League documents uncovered during discovery. Whereas the initial materials Jimmy had sent me had left quite a bit to be desired, the new documents seemed a treasure trove of useful evidence. Though WLAF officials claimed to be concerned about the lack of black coaches in professional football, they had passed up several opportunities to hire African Americans for the league. Jimmy was only one of the black coaches ultimately ignored by team GMs and the league itself, which had hiring authority over the clubs in Barcelona and London.
Rather than hire any blacks who applied for head coaching jobs with the World League—several of whom were assistant coaches in the NFL by that point—teams ultimately stocked up on white has-beens, most of whom had failed in previous positions. So, for instance, Sacramento hired Kay Stephenson, formerly the head coach of the Buffalo Bills, but whose record had been so bad that he’d failed to land another job after being fired several years earlier, and who was selling real estate in Florida at the time of his hiring. Likewise, Montreal hired Jacques Dussault, who had previously served as an assistant for two failed Canadian Football League teams, and Raleigh-Durham hired Roman Gabriel, a former star quarterback with the Los Angeles Rams, but who had been working as the GM of a minor league baseball franchise at the time of his hire, and who had only coached briefly at Cal Poly-Pomona, a school whose football program was so bad it had been disbanded after Gabriel’s tenure there.
Although the league claimed in its defense that it
had
made offers to black coaches, a careful examination of those claims suggested the offers had been in bad faith, and were more to keep up appearances of fairness than to truly bring diversity to the professional coaching ranks. Offers were made to three coaches in particular: Dennis Green (at that time the head coach at Stanford), Tony Dungy (at that time an assistant coach with the Kansas City Chiefs), and Milt Jackson, a veteran wide receivers coach in the NFL. But Green and Dungy were already being groomed for NFL coaching jobs and were known to be within a few years of securing such positions; as such, there was very little chance that either of them would have taken the risk of joining an experimental league, for less pay and prestige, and potentially derailing their professional trajectories. In fact, Green had told League president Jerome Vainisi that he had no interest in coaching in the WLAF. As for Milt Jackson, he had made it clear that he would only accept an offer for the Sacramento franchise because it would allow him to live close to his family. But rather than even interview him for the Sacramento job, the League offered him the position in Barcelona, knowing there was no way he would accept it.
To see how the League and its team GMs continually “moved the goalposts,” jiggling the job qualification requirements and relying on old boy’s networks in a way that worked to the benefit of whites and detriment of blacks, was an incredible lesson in the way institutional racism operates. Far from the bigotry of a David Duke, this was slick and systemic racism, the kind that had worked to marginalize not only Jimmy Jackson and other black coaches, but millions of black job applicants across the nation in any number of professions for decades, ever since the passage of civil rights laws.
Even more instructive was the way in which the League had employed a hiring criteria that, while facially race-neutral, was guaranteed to produce a racially-exclusionary impact on black coaching aspirants. So according to Jerome Vainisi, the League had been looking for coaches with experience in one of three prior arenas: either as head coach of a pro team, head coach of a “top fifty” college program, or as an offensive or defensive coordinator in either the National Football League or the short-lived United States Football League (USFL). Of course, as I would explain to Jimmy’s attorneys, such a criteria—even assuming the WLAF had been using it, rather than just going with the personal preferences of the white GMs—could not
but
produce an all-white outcome. At that point, there had never been a black head coach or offensive or defensive coordinator in a professional league, and the only African American college coach in a top program was Dennis Green, whose success in the college game ensured he would be holding out for a much more prestigious NFL gig. The World League certainly knew that the criteria would have that effect, so it seemed reasonable to conclude that their intent in using it had been to produce the disparate impact that was predictable from the start. But with or without intent, the exclusion of black coaches would be the result of such a criteria.
It was a perfect example of institutional racism, which allows racial disparity to be produced and maintained with or without the deliberate and bigoted intent of those producing the disparity, but merely as the product of normal operating procedures so common to employers. So often, the way in which qualification requirements are used favor those who have been in the pipeline for the best opportunities previously. Because of historic white privilege, relying on so-called experience indicators or seniority—as is normative on the part of most companies—will almost always screen out people of color who, through no fault of their own, haven’t been afforded the same opportunities to accumulate credentials over time. It’s not unlike having an eight-leg relay race, in which one runner has had a five lap head start, and then when the runner who started out behind fails to catch up and surpass the one with the unfair advantage, blaming that second runner for not being as good as the first.
Though the case seemed strong to me, sometimes circumstances work against the desired outcome in ways that can’t easily be avoided. As it turns out, American jurisprudence on racial discrimination law makes it very difficult to prove a case without clear evidence of intent to injure. Although it is possible to sustain a case of disparate impact without proving intent, typically courts require such cases to involve huge classes of plaintiffs, statistically large enough to demonstrate a clear disparity over a long period of time. In the case of the NFL and World League, the potential numbers of injured black coaches would have been only in the dozens—and the case before the court was not on behalf of even that many, but rather, only Jimmy—so the Judge classified the action as a disparate treatment case, meaning that the burden would be on Jimmy’s attorneys to prove that the League had deliberately excluded him from consideration because of race.
Although I felt there was still strong enough evidence to suggest disparate treatment, ultimately the jury would disagree. By the time the trial was held, Jimmy had ballooned to over four hundred pounds, his health suffering from the emotional impact of the mistreatment to which he’d been subjected, striking a visual that no doubt would make it difficult for any jurors to see him actively coaching a team from the sidelines. That, and the evidentiary limits imposed by the court, created long odds for Jimmy that he ultimately couldn’t overcome. I felt terrible, having taken this ride with him for so long, only to see it end in defeat. I was especially upset that his attorneys hadn’t warned me about the evidentiary rules for expert witnesses—rules that make it quite clear such witnesses are not allowed to testify to the ultimate issue (in this case whether or not the defendants had engaged in unlawful discrimination). Having not been advised as to what I could and couldn’t say, I had prepared an expert report in which I said, in no uncertain terms, that I thought the defendants had discriminated—a position I would repeat without hesitation at my deposition, much to the delight of the opposing attorneys (from the prestigious Covington and Burling law firm in D.C.), who were then able to successfully have me struck from the case for having overstepped the boundaries of expert testimony. Whatever I knew about racism and discrimination didn’t matter. It was what I didn’t know about the evidentiary standards of the American legal system that would make the biggest difference. It was the only time I would ever regret not having gone to law school. Still, what I’d learned about the way racism operates at the institutional level had been worth the experience, whatever the outcome.
OTHER LESSONS WOULD
be forthcoming during this time too, specifically, lessons about whiteness and its consequences even for white people, which were nearly as disturbing as the ones I had just learned about its effect on folks of color, thanks to the Jimmy Jackson case.
Back in late 1991, amid the generally heightened racial consciousness that had emerged thanks to the David Duke campaigns, New Orleans councilwoman Dorothy Mae Taylor had proposed a citywide antidiscrimination ordinance aimed at the prestigious private clubs that paraded during Mardi Gras. The parade krewes were targeted by Taylor because the clubs did far more than just throw parties every Lenten season—they were also the location of substantial business dealings and high-powered connections, ultimately linked to the opportunity structure in the city. Among the old-line elite krewes, it was also known that they had never had black or Jewish members. Because the connections made in the krewes often led to contracts with the city, and because the city subsidized the krewes’ activities (by providing clean up and security related to their parades), Taylor and other African Americans on the council believed it was only proper to insist that they be non-discriminatory in their operations. Ultimately, Taylor proposed that unless the krewes could prove they weren’t discriminating by the end of 1993, the organizations would be prohibited from parading in the following year’s festivities.
Almost as soon as the ordinance had been proposed, white New Orleanians had begun with the gnashing of teeth and the rattling of political sabers. How dare anyone tinker with the city’s care-free celebration of debauchery by turning it into a political football, they would say. How dare Dorothy Mae Taylor spoil our fun. Taylor became, almost immediately, the “Grinch who stole Carnival,” with whites across the political spectrum condemning her proposal and all who supported it as racial bomb throwers and troublemakers. One white gay civic organization actually compared her to David Duke and suggested the two should be married, given their presumably equivalent racial bigotries. Others would crow that people should be able to pick their own friends and club associates, no matter how racist they may be—an argument that was never the point, of course. Taylor was not seeking to restrict the krewes’ freedom of association; rather, she was suggesting that if one wants to do business with the city, or exploit private connections to do such business, or have the city clean up after one’s mess, one can and should be expected to play by the public’s rules.

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