Last night, the Washington Post released details about the NFL’s new plan for punishing homophobic and racist slurs on the field: In the coming season, calling someone a very bad name will result in a 15-yard penalty. The league says it’s taking a “zero tolerance” stance against hate speech by extending existing rules about “unsportsmanlike conduct” to certain words and phrases. All of this is explained in a video that the league will show to teams during training camp but has not been released to media outlets yet—so it’s unclear whether they’re just talking about the N- and F-words or if players will hurt their teams by calling opponents “pussies,” “bitches,” “wimps,” “shithearts,” “fat momma’s boys who should be eating pie and crying, not playing a game for MEN,” and the like.
To be sure, this new approach to supervising player behavior is well-intentioned and will make at least one space safer for non-white, non-straight players. Hopefully this will lead to teams being more proactive about language in locker rooms and other settings as well—and not just the stuff that gets said by players. (The Minnesota Vikings suspended the coach who talked about nuking the gays and was outed for his homophobia by punter Chris Kluwe, so that’s a start.)
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At the end of last season, the NFL proposed an earlier version of this directive that would have been an entirely new entry in the NFL’s rulebook. That rule would have handed out a 15-yard penalty to any player who used any form of the N-word on the field. That proposal was downright odd—what about black players who use it among themselves in a non-pejorative way? What about other racial slurs?—but obtuse is the name of the game in the No Fun League. The idea attracted enough interest that ESPN’s Outside the Lines held a roundtable discussion on it, and Grantland’s Rembert Browne wrote a long take on it that included an examination of the theory behind the rule change:
“The conversation highlighted [Fritz Pollard Alliance chairman John] Wooten’s push for “self-respect,” which suggests that black players are the target of this rule, even though he never explicitly said as much. From Wooten: “You hear it in the rap music, with the ‘H’s’ and the ‘B’s’ and then ‘N’s’ and so forth. And a lot of our young people have no idea how this ugly word came about.”
If the NFL had added that rule it would have come down rather awkwardly on one side of the “is it OK for black people to use the N-word?” debate, a complex and charged topic that Browne wrestles with in his essay. The league’s decision to instead designate slurs as “unsportsmanlike conduct” is a better choice, but as it does nearly every time it changes a policy, the NFL doesn’t quite get it right. You can get a player to cut out the N-word and the F-word on the field, but that doesn’t get rid of the air of homophobia in locker rooms around the league. Less than two years ago, we had 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver telling reporters during the Super Bowl media frenzy, “No, we don’t got no gay people on the team, they gotta get up out of here if they do.” Just a couple weeks ago, former coach and NBC analyst Tony Dungy said he wouldn’t have drafted Michael Sam, allegedly not because of his own prejudice but because he didn’t feel properly equipped to deal with the distractions that would come with a gay player. The Rooney Rule didn’t cure systemic racism in the NFL, and a 15-yard penalty for slurs won’t take the hate out of anyone’s heart.
The NFL is in the business of marketing a violent sport played by fired-up young men to a country that doesn’t like to admit it’s attraction to bloodlust and rage. That’s a tricky spot to be in, so no wonder the league is increasingly policing its players’ behavior, from drug tests for marijuana to a sometimes inconsistent push to punish defenders for illegal hits. Maybe the trend toward paternalism is natural, but in this case, if the NFL wanted to show its players and fans that racism and slurs are wrong, it could have led by example and changed the team name that is literally a racist slur.
Lindsey Adler is often accused of PC policing. Follow her on Twitter.
