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Mellissa Harris-Perry: Okay Takeaway family, I've got a question.

Speaker 2: Are you ready for the football?

Mellissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Today we begin with Super bowl 56. Now, in my house, no matter who is taking the field, we are Who Dat' Nation.

Speaker 2: One time for the Who Dat' Nation because we bleed black and gold. All the fans in the stands want to dance because they feel it all in their soul.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: Now, stick with me for a second because I know The Saints are not in the big game this weekend, but one of the things we take pride in is always representing for our team; win, lose, or paper bags on our heads. In fact, for those of us whose teams are not dripping in rings, there is a kind of pleasure in standing-watch with hopeful anticipation for the possibility that this year it could be different.

It's like if your own team diversify the coaching staff. You know what I mean? It might seem like there's plenty of talent and that you even have the will to get it done, but somehow you just keep coming up with an L. There have been 24 Black head coaches in the entire history of the NFL, 24. The first was Fritz Pollard who led the Akron Pros in 1921. Yes, it's been 100 years. 100 years, 24 Black coaches. During this season there were only 3 out of 32. Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers, David Coley of the Houston Texans who was fired after just one season and Brian Flores of the Miami Dolphins. Flores was also terminated at the end of the season and he did not leave the field quietly. He's filed suit against the NFL alleging racial discrimination in the leagues hiring practices and interview process.

Brian Flores: At the end of the day, we need change. We need change. I know many very capable Black coaches, some of my staff who I know if given an opportunity or when given an opportunity are going to go and do a great job on an interview. I would just hate for that to be a waste. I think we need to change the hearts and minds of the people making those decisions. That's why we filed the lawsuit.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: Now, just this week, Lovey Smith was hired to lead the Houston Texans. This may be too little too late. Sports commentators and former players are speaking out about racism inside the league.

Speaker 4: There's nobody more incriminating than the New York Giants. We are in the year 2022. All of these years, damn near a century for crying out loud. As a century football has existed, there's one franchise that has not had one single Black coach, that's the New York Giants. We don't even want to get started. I know you had a good year. I know you had a Black GM but you have never hired a Black coach.

Speaker 5: Bottom line is there's no diversity in ownership. There's 32 owners, 31 white billionaires. Obviously you also have the Green Bay Packers that are publicly owned, but there are no faces that are like mine, no faces that are like Brian Flores', there are no representations of us. When you look at some of the nepotism, some of the good old boy clubs, some of the familiarity hirings in the NFL, shouldn't we be used to it? This is a historical problem. This is a societal problem. This is institutional racism. This is systemic racism. It's just permeating throughout the NFL.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: My good friend, Dave Zirin, Sports Editor for The Nation, calls this a moment of crisis when it comes to hiring Black coaches in the NFL.

Dave Zirin: It wasn't some great prediction that this was going to go from a point of embarrassment, which it's been for decades in the NFL, the absence of Black head coaches, to an actual crisis. You saw it becoming a crisis with a couple of the firings that took place several weeks back. One was of course of Brian Flores coming off two consecutive winning seasons with the Miami Dolphins. The first coach of the Dolphins to do that in almost 20 years just to get summarily fired.

The other coach who was fired was a terrific coach named David Coley with the Houston Texans, who was only there for one year. The team was mired in scandal. Some outlets had them winning zero games this year and they won four. Oh and by the way, David Coley only has over 40 years of coaching experience and this was his first head coaching job. He was summarily fired.

This is what Janice Madden who's a terrific academic, I believe out of U Penn at the time, 20 years ago she did a statistical study about patterns with Black coaches in the NFL. This won't surprise listeners, but she has the data that shows, and this is 20 years ago, and some people say it's only gotten worse, "Last to get hired, first to get fired and often hired for terrible situations, "like Flores and Coley were," only to stay until they can right the ship and then they're jettison for a young, pretty white thing.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: I asked Dave if this was about Black and white, or just about green.

Dave Zirin: There's a famous quote by Eric Winston who's the former head of the NFL Players Association, that's the union. He said that being an NFL franchise owner is like being a bartender at spring break. You don't have to be particularly good at it to make tons of money. That's one thing, the green is coming, Melissa, no matter who's on the sideline. There's actually a disincentive, especially with tens of billions of dollars in television revenue locked up for the next several decades and because the NFL has revenue sharing. As former Cleveland Browns owner, Art Modell, once said, he said, "NFL franchise owners are 28 capitalists who act like socialists when it comes to the NFL's money." They divide it all up whether you're in Green Bay or New York. The money's there, the green is there, there is no grand incentive to hire the best person for the job especially if you're a racist.

That gets to the second quote I want to share. This is from Michael Silver, who is a true insider in the National Football League. He's written, I believe, 70 cover stories about the league for sports illustrated. He until recently worked for years for the NFL's own media outlet, the nfl.com. Three weeks ago, before the Flores lawsuit of course, he put out a tweet where he said, "There is systemic racism in the NFL and there are racists in positions of power and I'm tired of not speaking about these two issues." This is Michael Silver talking.

When you factor all of that in, when you factor that you have Trumpists largely in the owners box, a typical NFL owner, if you go by political donations, is to the right of Genghis Khan. When you factor that in and when you also factor in the fact that the money is locked in, then that provides actually an incentive, I would argue, for people who are rife with racial prejudice and also who hate being told what to do by others. That's another part of this too. I would argue is the billionaire plutocratic mentality that hates being told by the so-called help or by the people what they should be doing and who they should be hiring.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: It's odd because back in 2020, the NFL adopted a Pro-Black Lives Matter marketing strategy. Here's what Dave had to say about the juxtaposition of affirming that Black Lives Matter despite refusing to hire Black head coaches.

Dave Zirin: Isn't that interesting too? Some people commented. They said, "Wait a minute. They have end racism in the end zones. Isn't that enough?" To me, this is just about the public relations of our particular moment. We have to remember that the summer of 2020 saw the largest protests in the history of the United States after the police murder of George Floyd. The NFL wants to connect with that audience particularly because that audience is young, demographically diverse ad frankly, it's the future of this country as much as it wants to connect with its fan-base, which I would argue is largely white and right of center.

It's an effort to balance those two impulses because they also know that their traditional audience is getting older and they want to reach back to that younger audience. They've operated without argue a carrot and stick mentality where the carrot is like, "Hey look, end racism. Hey look, we have a social-justice committee. Hey look, we are committed to these ideas of anti-racism, look at us." Then there's the reality, which I would argue provides messaging to white fans who are comforted by the site of Black talent yet controlled by white authority.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: Why then would a Black person want to be coach in the NFL?

Dave Zirin: Oh, because coaching and I say this as somebody who coaches my son's basketball rec ball team; a bunch of just foul-smelling 13 and 14-year olds. It's not their fault. They're 13 and 14, they're still trying to understand deodorant. I could tell you, coaching is a passion. If you have a passion and love for football, you want to do it at the highest possible level. Particularly if you come up as a coach through the ranks, particularly if you're somebody who maybe was once a player who had a leadership role, who now wants to take what you learned and bring it to the top level. There are only 32 of these jobs and so people, of course they want these jobs, they want to be able to have the authority at the top of the pyramid.

The problem, and this is where we're at with Brian Flores, is that the level of disrespect is so intense that it's just done with it. There are only so many times you can get a door slammed in your face. Reading Brian Flores's lawsuit, it's not surprisingly to me that what finally pushed him to saying, "You know what, I'm going to air out the racism in the house, I'm opening the windows. There's too much old man racism in the curtains. We're going to get the smell out of the house."

Mellissa Harris-Perry: I just had to know, is this fixable?

Dave Zirin: Possibly. We're at a fork in the road right now, Melissa, and I would argue it's the most important fork of the road in regards to race in the National Football League in 75 years since integration itself in the NFL. That's how big a deal this Flores lawsuit is because Colin Kaepernick, for all his bravery let's remember, he was using the platform of the NFL to point at society. Brian Flores is using his platform to point inside the tent and saying, "Hey, if we're so concerned about racism, why don't we clean up our own house and start there?" Now the NFL has to respond to something that is blatantly and objectively obvious in terms of the hiring patterns in the league.

Now so far they're doubling down with saying, "Oh, this is without merit, we're going to fight these charges. This is defamatory." All the language is coming out like that. The public shaming involved, if it involves players and coaches standing with Brian Flores right now, you could see, not to mention the media, but most critically as players and coaches then you could see perhaps a cultural shift in the national football league, but absence that level of solidarity inside the league, and I'm very pointedly not saying fans because I also don't believe pigs can fly out my window, so I don't think you're going to see masses of NFL fans marching for racial justice. It's going to have to happen inside the league. If it happens you could see a change or this could also revert back to the racist sloth that the NFL has been in this whole time.

There's one other factor, Melissa, that could change the movement calculus of this and that's one of the accusations that Brian Flores put forward in his lawsuit where he said that the franchise owner of the Miami Dolphins, a man named Stephen Ross, offered him $100,000 under the table for each loss that the team accrued and Flores refused to do that. Now, if that's proven out and Flores says he's got proof of that, Ross denies it, that enters a level where people start doubting the legitimacy of the games themselves if they feel like that's in the culture of the National Football League.

When you factor in the league's a massive partnering with gambling operations, and we've all seen the commercials a million times like, "Hi, I'm Bill Clinton for DraftKings," that's not a real commercial but that's coming. You know that's coming. Then I think that that also is a weakness in the NFL's defenses against this lawsuit because they might need to have to air out the house to have legitimacy with their high gambling audience.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: I also wanted to understand how the Super Bowl affects all of the supporting cast of the big day including the city where it's hosted?

Dave Zirin: If you get the Super Bowl in your city, it is certainly an infusion of cash to the local tourist industry, hotels, the rest of it but it does come at a cost on a couple of levels. First and foremost, a lot of the economic activity, it's obviously very brief. This will pop off for about a week and then it'll go back. We're talking about the kinds of jobs that'll be created that tend to be very low income jobs, they tend to have no security, no healthcare, it's the equivalent of seasonal work in the service industry. If people think that's a stable way to run an economy, I have arguments with that.

The second part of the cost that comes with this, if we're talking about labor, working people is the unhoused community in Los Angeles which some listeners may refer to as homeless. I would push back against the word homeless because what they've done in the Los Angeles is create homes for themselves in these tent communities that exist. The unhoused people who've created these communities, they're already getting cleared out in a big one that exists near the stadium. Los Angeles is not being shy about the fact that this is for optics, this is for the tourists.

They're being cleared out, they're losing the few possessions they have. There are reports of people losing their possessions because they're being swept out so quickly and basically dumped away from the stadium with no sense of community, all the cohesion that they've created for themselves. Let's also remember that in Los Angeles, which has a dire and severe unhoused population, that many of these folks work in the very industries that keep the Super Bowl afloat during Super Bowl Week.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: One other labor question. what about the dancers and the performers who are dancing all the way through halftime and not getting paid?

Dave Zirin: They're fighting back, they're raising their voice too. This is a remarkable time we're living in, Melissa, because for years we would speak about these issues as injustices almost in a vacuum where people are almost perpetually victimized. We refer to them as victims because it's an objective truth that they're being victimized by a system that doesn't value their labor and figures that, well, you're a dancer you should be happy just to be out there dancing no matter the arduous physical effort that goes into being a Super Bowl dancer and everything that goes into that, being a professional dancer in general.

They're speaking out and they're fighting back and they're pushing back and it's going to be very interesting to see how that changes it especially oh, Melissa, because this year's halftime show is going to launch a thousand theses. Articles both academic and public will launch from this because for folks who don't know, the halftime show is Snoop, Mary J Blige, Eminem and Dr. Dre. All being produced by Jay-Z as part of his partnership with the NFL which remember, came together in 2019.

As part of this, as Jay-Z put it, "We have to move beyond Kaepernick, we have to move beyond kneeling," and Jay-Z's admirers said, "Oh, look at him, he's playing chess. He's going to bring the NFL into the 21st century. There's going to be Black ownership, there's going to be more Black coaches because finally we have someone with a seat at the table in Jay-Z." Well, Jay-Z is a billionaire so Jay-Z looked out for Jay-Z. He now has this halftime show in the context of Brian Flores's lawsuit.

It's once again, the NFL's bathing in Black culture while disrespecting Black minds. The NFL, once again to use the famous phrase, 'loving all the rhythm of Black culture and none of the blues,' and that will be interesting. Then of course there's another side to this, Melissa, which is that we're living in an era of the backlash and if you think right wing America is going to be happy seeing Dr. Dre, and Mary J Blige, Snoop, and Eminem on their halftime show, there's going to be a racist response as well to that.

In other words, my head hurts because it's going to come from all directions. Halftime show, that might be some time where I make some cocktail wienies and go into the other room. Although no, I'm just kidding, I cannot resist.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: Oh, we're going to watch this. It's going to launch 1,000 theses, you're going to write 429 of them. Come on.

Dave Zirin: No, I'm watching it. I'm watching it. It's literally making my head hurt because it's like, yes, Hip Hop, deal with it America. No, NFL bathing in Black culture while disrespecting Black minds again. There's going to be a lot going on.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: It's all American in that sense though. To the extent that much of what happens in the context of the Super bowl is symbolic, it certainly is appropriate symbolism for how so much of the experience of Blackness is lived out.

Dave Zirin: Yes, absolutely. That's why it means so much to people to see Black people in positions of authority on a football field as head coaches, as executives, as franchise owners because this idea of the playing field looking so much like America, which is sometimes said as a way to celebrate America like, look at the playing field Black, white, brown people getting along, cooperating.

Oftentimes the playing field is used as that kind of metaphor but there's also this uglier metaphor that you see in the National Football League of Black talent but also Black destruction of the Black body as part of playing football and then white authority governing over that. White authority that doesn't have to risk the physical toll, white authority that is in place for 5, 10, 20 years while Black players play on average three and a half years. That's why Michael Bennett, the former player who I did a book with, he always said, "NFL stood for either not for long or any word for lease."

Mellissa Harris-Perry: All right. One more piece I want to ask you about. I had the joy of talking to a mutual friend of ours, Wade Davis, yesterday. I love him so much. Wade being Wade did this amazing analysis around-- I ask from the question that I've asked you many times around like, "Well, how can you hate football and love it at the same time?" He did this really lovely analysis around the queerness of football and the idea that it's this one of the few faces where men are not only allowed out to but encouraged to really act as a team, to rely on one another, to be physical with one another.

Again, he wasn't making a point about queer sexuality or about same sex sexual action, but rather about pushing beyond these very narrow boundaries. I thought it was so fascinating given that it's also a hyper masculine and relatively violent sport in some ways. I just wanted to ask you to weigh in on this idea that football might someday become the very aspiration of what's living inside of it, which is can we queer the Super Bowl?

Dave Zirin: As you were telling that story, I kept thinking of this time I was interviewing a mixed martial artist and mixed martial arts also involves a great deal of same sex touching and rolling around and all sorts of things like that. I was talking to this MMA fighter and he's a mat wrestler, which means a lot of the horizontal fighting going on. I said to him, "There's a lot of homophobia in mixed martial arts. How do you square that with the kind of touching that's involved to be able to succeed?" He was silent for many seconds and he said, "It's only gay if you make eye contact."

Mellissa Harris-Perry: Oh.

Dave Zirin: Yes. I love Wade. I would argue that mentality is still prevalent in the National Football League. That it's a way of people to try to actually mitigate their own homophobia while at the same time answering a certain urge for intimacy, particularly between men, which doesn't otherwise exist in society. There is tremendous intimacy in a locker room, and there's tremendous intimacy in the physical act of playing football, but are people willing to acknowledge that and actually look each other in the eye in the locker room in that way? When I say in that way, I'm not talking about sex, I'm not talking about libido. I'm talking about intimacy. This idea of feeling close to another person. It's 2022 and the NFL is dealing with issues in the LGBTQ area that to me sometimes feel a lot more like the mid '90s than 2022.

If you're asking me, is progress being made on that front, absolutely, because of the broader society, and it's not just-- and we're still waiting for more NFL players to come out and be honest about-- live their truth, I should say, as NFL players. We're also talking about tons of NFL players who are open about having LGBTQ members of their family, about supporting LGBTQ issues. There's now an open LGBTQ player, Carl Nassib, in the National Football League and the news was basically a one-day news story that there was a gay. That level of progress is very real, but I would argue we still have a ways to go.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: Is there any other thing about the Super Bowl I haven't asked about that you want to be sure? Any other angle or aspect where you're like, man, if you're talking about the Super Bowl, you definitely have to get this aspect in?

Dave Zirin: Well, I don't know if anybody out there is a fan of the movie Four Brothers starring-

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Mellissa Harris-Perry: Oh my God. I'm sorry. That movie is like-- are you serious? Okay.

Dave Zirin: I love Four Brothers. I don't love Four Brothers. It's actually extremely problematic in some areas. I should say that my remote control stops when it's on TV. That's all I'll say.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: Yes, I'm with you. I'm with you. Okay.

Dave Zirin: That's all I'll say. The quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals is Mark Walberg in Four Brothers. Even though the Los Angeles Rams are a profoundly more talented team, Joe Burrow is Mark Walberg from Four Brothers and Joe Burrow has a chance just on the issue of the swag factor alone to lead the Cincinnati Bengals to an upset victory.

Mellissa Harris-Perry: Oh God. Dave Zirin, just never ever am I disappointed when I talk to you. I enjoy talking with you so much. Thank you for joining us on The Takeaway.

Dave Zirin: Oh, you're very welcome.

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