Shifting views on race behind anger at NFL
Republicans see bias as a thing of the past and say white people face unfair treatment.
WASHINGTON — Our Los Angeles Times/SurveyMonkey Super Bowl poll caught attention this week for finding that 45% of Republicans say they believe the NFL is doing “too much” to “show respect for its Black players.”
The poll also found that 52% of Republicans say they disapprove of the football league’s Rooney rule, which requires teams to interview Black candidates and other people of color for head coaching positions and other executive jobs.
In both cases, the views of Republicans differ sharply from those of Democrats or independents.
The results surprised some people, in part because the Republican reaction seems out of proportion to the realities of the NFL.
Why would people object to actions described as showing respect or to the Rooney rule, which, for all the praise it has received from business leaders over the years, has been notable for its ineffectiveness?
The answer lies in an ideological shift among Republicans: Belief that discrimination against Black Americans and other people of color is a thing of the past and that white Americans are now the ones who face unfair treatment has increasingly become a core GOP view.
That strain of thought has run through parts of the Republican coalition for decades — and gathered strength after Democrats embraced civil rights legislation in the 1960s and the GOP began to pick up support among white Southernors.
In 1990, for example, North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms infamously ran a 30-second campaign ad showing a pair of white hands crumpling up a rejection letter as an announcer intoned that “you needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.”
At the time, Helms was widely seen as an outlier among Republicans. In 2001, two years before Helms’ retirement, the Washington Post’s political columnist David Broder declared the senator “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.”
For decades, Republican leaders insisted their party was moving away from his style of race-based politics.
Alas, both they and Broder underestimated the staying power of racism.
The rise of former President Trump, with his open appeals to anti-immigrant sentiment and white nationalism, made that clear.
“It’s not so much that Trump made people more resentful,” UC Irvine political scientist Michael Tesler said in an email. “But he did make them more impactful in politics.”
The belief that white Americans face discrimination was “a potent predictor of support for Trump in the 2016 primaries,” noted Tesler, who wrote a book on that campaign with political scientists Lynn Vavreck of UCLA and John Sides of Vanderbilt University. That viewpoint “also predicted general election votes in 2016 and 2020.”
“With the party’s base increasingly animated by racial grievances,” he added, “these explicit appeals to white identity politics are increasingly characterizing GOP messaging in the postTrump era.”
Or, as political analyst Ron Brownstein wrote: “The belief that whites are the real victims of bias is absolute bedrock for Trump’s GOP coalition.”
Whenever this topic comes up, Republicans are quick to insist that they’re not racists: They just oppose special treatment for anyone on the basis of a group, they say, or they believe that Democrats exploit racial identity as a way to keep voter support.
Regardless of how one defines racism, the evidence that many Republicans believe white Americans, not Black Americans, to be the prime victims of discrimination comes from many sources. One is the extensive polling done by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center as part of its long-running project to sort out how Americans group themselves by ideology, what Pew calls its political typologies.
As part of that project, Pew asked: “How much more, if anything, needs to be done to ensure equal rights for all Americans regardless of their racial or ethnic backgrounds?”
Half of Americans said “a lot” more needs to be done. Among Democratic groups, more than 75% said so. But among the groups that form the Republican coalition — Pew’s system divides the GOP into four types — that share ranged from 4% to 22%.
Among people Pew labeled “Faith and Flag” conservatives — a core group on the Republican right — 56% said that “nothing at all” remains to be done.
Those most conservative voters were also the most likely to say that white people in the U.S. face discrimination — with 37% of them saying white Americans face “a lot” of discrimination and 39% saying they face “some.” Majorities across the GOP coalition said white people face at least some discrimination.
The party division could not be starker: Among Democrats, less than 4% said white people face a lot of discrimination; fewer than 1 in 5 say they face some.
“Perhaps no issue area highlights the deep divide between the partisan coalitions” more than “attitudes about race and racial justice,” Pew’s analysts wrote in their typology report.
As Tesler noted, those attitudes affect a wide range of public issues. For the most recent examples, see the GOP criticisms of President Biden for pledging to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Stephen G. Breyer.
“That’s offensive,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on his weekly podcast.
“Black women are, what, 6% of the U.S. population? He’s saying to 94% of Americans: ‘I don’t give a damn about you. You are ineligible,’ ” Cruz said, in language that bore more than a passing resemblance to Helms’ famous ad.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was quick to note that Cruz had not criticized Trump when he promised to nominate a woman after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In 1981, President Reagan fulfilled a promise to name the first woman to the court.
In both of those cases, the Republican presidents nominated white women: Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Sandra Day O’Connor.
Of course, political opportunism is at play. Biden’s pledge to name the first Black female justice in the court’s 232-year history backed up a promise to a key Democratic constituency. Cruz and other Republicans want to make him pay a price for redeeming that pledge.
What’s noteworthy is not that they’re criticizing him, but that they believe they can gain political mileage by accusing him of giving something — in this case a court nomination — to a Black person.
The hardening of Republican attitudes toward race goes beyond the fight over the court.
As Biden has repeatedly said, Republicans in both the House and Senate voted as recently as 2006 to renew and expand the Voting Rights Act, one of the key legislative accomplishments of the civil rights era. When President George W. Bush signed the expansion into law that year, his White House trumpeted the bill as a major achievement.
Today, only one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has been willing to publicly support renewing the law, which has been hollowed out by a series of Supreme Court rulings.
All that comes against a backdrop of continued huge gaps between Black and white Americans on income, wealth, education, life expectancy and other measurements.
Which brings us back to the NFL.
Race has been very much an issue in the league this month because of a lawsuit brought by Brian Flores, the former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, accusing the league and three teams of racial discrimination.
Roughly 70% of the NFL’s players are Black, and the league currently has just one Black head coach, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers, with a second, Lovie Smith, recently announced by the Houston Texans. That’s one fewer than the league had when the Rooney rule took effect in 2003.
“OK, we’re not having this success we want with head coaches,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell conceded Wednesday at his annual pre-Super Bowl state-of-the-league session. The issue for the league, he said, is “how do we evolve that rule, or do we have to have a new rule? Do we need to figure out some other way of being able to achieve that outcome?”
It’s an odd moment for nearly half of Republicans to say that professional football — or the U.S. as a whole — is doing “too much.”
This is the Feb. 11 edition of the Essential Politics newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox three times a week at latimes.com/ essentialpolitics.