Rooney Rule, MLK, and the Nominations Committee

There is a rule in the NFL called the Rooney Rule that requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for any open head coaching position.  The rule was instituted years ago in an effort to break up the virtual monopoly of head coaching positions by white candidates.  There is renewed conversation about the need for the rule, and maybe reinforcing it this year after all the vacant head coach and general manager positions were filled by white men.  The conversation tends to center around the tension of not hiring someone based on their skin color, but still finding ways to make sure people of all skin colors have the same opportunities.

Often cited by both sides in such arguments is the quote by Martin Luther King, that people "will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."  While it clearly seems to speak against such quotas as the Rooney Rule requires, I am not sure that King would have been opposed to such rules.  Maybe fifty years ago the rule would have been needed to prevent owners from making racial motivated decisions for hiring.  I am not sure that the problem today is that candidates are being excluded because of skin color.  More likely it is a combination of two things, coincidence (it is a relatively small sample size after all), and the fact that people tend to trust what they know, and in a society that tends to still clump around lines like race and class, white people are going to tend to know white people, and black people are going to tend to know black people, and so subtly you tend to hire around those same lines, not because of racial motivations but more along the lines of habit.

A great example of this for me is the nominations process that has been going on at churches everywhere as we set our committees and leadership teams for 2013.  My experience of the nominations process is this, we either tend to look for the most obscure people (who is a new person we can get involved), or we tend to think about the people already in leadership positions, Mr Darcy is rotating off the trustees, with his fortune I bet he would a good person for the finance committee.  We don't mean to exclude people, but we tend to think about the people we know, the people we like, the people we are like.  The hardest part about nominations is thinking about the people you don't really know, and finding a good fit for them.

The really hard part is realizing the people you are missing ... because if you knew you were missing them you wouldn't be missing them.  One of my goals in college was to sit at different tables at dinner. There were a number of people who sat at the same table every night and in turn sat with the same friends.  By switching tables I would sit with different groups of people and thus broaden who I was connecting to and staying in touch with.  In turn the people who sat with me would experience a similar mixing as different groups of friends merged at this new location.

Sadly now that my college days are done it is harder to intentionally sit at a new table and meet new people. So maybe we do need "Rooney Rules" in our lives.  Not because we are racist, or sexist, or classist, but because without forced effort on our parts we will not live out the full meaning of Dr. King's dream, which is not just an end to racism, but an end to segregation, a dream of place where we all mix and mingle as children of God.