Brian Flores’ Lawsuit Captures An Awful, All-Too-Common Feeling For People Of Color

On Tuesday, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a bombshell class action lawsuit against the NFL over the league’s racist hiring practices.

In one of the most shocking allegations in his suit, Flores says the New York Giants deceived him into thinking he had a legitimate opportunity to interview for the role of head coach, while secretly the Giants had already decided to hire Brian Daboll, a white man, for the role.

Flores contends his interview was a “sham” that was meant to give the appearance that the Giants had seriously considered minority candidates in accordance with NFL policies.

And he brought receipts.

Three days before Flores was set to interview with the Giants last month, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick accidentally let Flores know the Giants apparently had no interest in actually hiring him. Thinking he was texting Daboll, Belichick mistakenly congratulated Flores for landing the job, writing, “You are their guy,” according to screenshots included in the lawsuit.

“Coach, are you talking to Brian Flores or Brian Daboll,” Flores wrote. “Just making sure.”

“Sorry ― I fucked this up,” Belichick replied. “I double checked [and] I misread the text. I think they are naming Daboll. I’m sorry about that.”

Flores still went to his interview with the Giants, and two days later the team announced they hired Daboll. The lawsuit contends that Flores was “humiliated in the process as the New York Giants subjected him to a sham interview in an attempt to appear to provide a Black candidate with a legitimate chance at obtaining the job.”

The allegation calls into question the NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” which requires each team to interview at least two minority candidates for the head coaching position and at least one minority candidate for certain other roles. It’s a practice that was started by the league in 2003 in an attempt to address diversity in hiring, and similar measures have since been adopted by many companies in tech and media.

Flores’ suit states that, well-intentioned or not, “It is clear that the Rooney Rule is not working. … Management is not doing the interviews in good-faith, and it therefore creates a stigma that interviews of Black candidates are only being done to comply with the Rooney Rule rather than in recognition of the talents that the Black candidates possess.”

Seventy percent of NFL players are Black. When the Rooney Rule was first adopted in 2003, there were three Black head coaches. But at the moment, there is just one: Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Only two other coaches come from underrepresented backgrounds (Ron Rivera is Latino, and Robert Saleh is Arab American).

In a statement, the Giants stood by the decision to hire Daboll as the “most qualified” candidate: “Brian Flores was in the conversation to be our head coach until the eleventh hour. Ultimately, we hired the individual we felt was most qualified.”

Pamela Newkirk, a journalist and the author of “Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business,” said the problem with racial bias is that often you cannot prove it in individual situations, but the numbers ultimately tell the story.

“If you continually have this glaring lack of diversity in a field where the main component, the players, are overwhelmingly Black but you can never seem to find coaches of color, what else could that be but racial bias?” she said.

What happened to Flores is unfortunately common, and happens often outside of the NFL. For the many other people of color who have been subjected to sham interviews designed to fulfill company mandates, Flores said the quiet part out loud: A lot of job interviews allow a company to simply check a diversity-in-hiring box without actually caring about inclusivity or equity.

One obvious sign an interview is not being taken seriously is that the candidate’s time isn’t respected. Flores’ suit detailed a separate example of an alleged sham interview he endured with the Denver Broncos. Team executives allegedly showed up an hour late, looking disheveled and as if they had been drinking heavily the night before.

Another way is to set them up to fail. Take the Rooney Rule for head coaches: It was updated in 2018 to include a requirement that teams interview at least one minority candidate not already employed by the club, because the league had to stop teams from circumventing the spirit of the rule by interviewing lower-level internal employees who had no chance at the head coaching job.

Ellen Bailey, now a vice president of diversity and culture at Harvard Business Publishing, once realized that she was on a sham interview when it came time for questions. In her 30s, she interviewed for a pharmaceutical sales job for which she was told she was among 10 finalists for nine positions.

During the interview, Bailey, who was the only Black finalist, realized she was being set up to fail. The sales job did not require a degree in science or biology, but her interview was all about science and biology.

“There were questions where there was no way that I would be able to answer. They were asking me scientific questions. … I remember at the time going, ‘No, I can’t calculate that formula,’” Bailey said. “They saw a Black woman who, back then even, it was like, ‘Oh, she speaks well. She doesn’t sound Black.’ People would just say that upfront.”

Bailey was the only finalist not to get a job, and the rejection left her feeling she wasn’t smart enough. Seeing no future in pharmaceutics, she changed industries. Bailey said it took decades and success at her current job to realize that “it’s not that I’m not smart enough, I’ve just been left behind” because she wasn’t an insider.

To this day, recounting her sham interview experience makes her cry.

“I was able to then shift industries and careers and do well. But I also don’t know what I could have done in that career,” Bailey said. “This whole time I’m thinking I have to overcome that I’m not smart enough, and it also just makes you feel bad when you think you’re not good enough. It’s very devastating.”

Deverin Muff, a sports management and exercise professor at Kentucky State University, said he took what happened to Flores personally because he also has endured too many humiliating fake interviews throughout his career as a Black professional in academia.

Muff said he’s found that one of the telltale signs of a sham interview is that the interviewer asks only superficial questions about his background. “Nothing in the interview could tell them why I would be a good person for the job,” he said.

Muff said he has even gone into interviews where he’s shared short- and long-term plans for what he can accomplish in the role, “and I’ve been told, ‘Nah, that’s OK.’ You kind of realize, ‘Oh, I was never going to be the person for this job.’”

Sometimes, the only way to figure out the sham is to see who ends up getting the job.

Muff said it became clear to him after one interview process when he heard from a friend who was in the loop about the hiring decision. The feedback she had heard? That he was not qualified enough, despite having a doctorate degree.

“Are you sure we want to take a risk on him? He just got his doctorate degree,” was the reported response. But Muff later learned that the white woman who got the job had only just graduated with a master’s degree and no work experience. “That stuff kind of stings,” Muff said.

“The sad part about that is being a minority, you always have to question, ‘Was it because of race?’ Unfortunately you don’t get those answers a lot,” he said.

Sometimes, people may not realize an interview was a sham until after they take the job and see for themselves the company’s approach to diversity.

One Black female tech professional in the diversity, equity and inclusion field said she can relate to Flores being tokenized because she experienced it after being hired. During the hiring process, she was led to believe that senior leadership supported her work in diversity. But once she met with the CEO, she realized that wasn’t the case. He called it a “cushy job,” the woman shared, and did not think of building diversity as work.

Her interview had been a sham.

“I cannot even imagine how humiliated [Flores] must still feel,” she said.

She also noted that getting career opportunities as a person of color because you’re a person of color doesn’t have to be considered painfully as a “handout.”

“For so long, certain opportunities have only been given to certain groups, because they were shown extreme favor. And if the way for me to be able to move forward and be successful is because you feel like you are going to show me favor, because of one of these additional pieces –- which is my ethnic background, which brings a lot of skills and experience that you don’t have ― then so be it,” the woman said. “You’re choosing me because I’m a person of color, but you’re also noticing that that’s a skill.”

Muff said realizing that an interview is a sham provokes a range of emotions. “After the humiliation, sometimes you get angry like, ‘How could someone do this to me? I thought we were past this,’” he said, noting that on social media, “you see all these different people doing the performative action of posting a black square and saying some statement about how they are for you and then you see them turn around and do the same things.”

But then he finds these emotions can shift to sadness too.

“You hope something changes, you try to be the change, but you understand you can only do so much.”