During a news conference Wednesday introducing Jerod Mayo as the new coach of the New England Patriots, Mayo, the first Black head coach the Patriots have ever had, put the NFL on notice that he’s not too timid to discuss race, not even after the team’s owner had just said he was “really colorblind” when hiring Mayo.
What I will say, though, is I do see color because I believe if you don’t see color, you can’t see racism.
“I want to get the best people I can get,” Patriots owner Robert Kraft said in introducing Mayo. (The franchise and Bill Belichick, who won six Super Bowls as coach of the Patriots, mutually parted ways last week.) “I chose the best head coach for this organization,” Kraft said. He said Mayo “happens to be a man of color. But I chose him because I believe he’s best to do the job.”
“You want your locker room to be pretty diverse, and you want the world to look like that,” Mayo, a former Patriots star linebacker who’s now the NFL’s youngest coach, said. “What I will say, though, is I do see color because I believe if you don’t see color, you can’t see racism,” Mayo said. Later he added that seeing color is necessary so that “we can try to fix the problem that we all know we have.”
The “we” there could equally refer to the National Football League and to the city of Boston.
To say the NFL has a race and diversity problem is to state the obvious. According to data from 2021, 71% of NFL were players of color but, counting Mayo, there are only five Black head coaches. (A sixth, the Las Vegas Raiders’ Antonio Pierce, is serving as coach in an interim capacity.) In 2022, Bryan Flores, who is Black and a former coach of the Miami Dolphins, alleged in a lawsuit that the league “is racially segregated and is managed much like a plantation.”
But Mayo being one of a handful of Black coaches in the NFL is only half the story. The other half is where he’ll be coaching. “You’d better believe being the…
Read the full article here