Brandon Marshall, the New York Jets wide receiver and occasional sports commentator, charges that the National Football League is racist [1]. He alleges that the league favors white players over black athletes like him, especially white marquee quarterbacks.
Aside from the fact that Marshall recently signed a three-year contract for $27 million — and, for example, African-American lineman Marcell Dareus just concluded a contract extension with the Buffalo Bills for six years at $100 million — examine Marshall’s whimper in light of the demography of the National Football League.
Currently, African-Americans comprise about 12% of the population. Yet they make up about 67% of the current meritocratic, but allegedly racist NFL roster. In the quota parlance of affirmative action engineering, they are “overrepresented” in one of America’s most prestigious and compensated industries at over five times their percentages in the general population. Nor are blacks just the purported grunts on the battlefield of the league; they make up 16% of the head coaches and 24% of the league’s general managers.