The struggle, ongoing

 Eric Bieniemy was on the Kansas City sideline last night, coordinating the offense the way he has for the Chiefs since 2018. He's been an assistant in K.C. for nine years now. His first NFL assistant's job was 17 years ago, when he was hired as running backs coach by the Minnesota Vikings.

In 2007 and 2008, his top back, Adrian Peterson, led the NFL in rushing. As the Chiefs' OC,  he won a ring in 2020. He's 52 years old, and pretty much everyone in the NFL thinks it's high time the guy was a head coach -- especially considering some of the noodle-brains who have been head coaches during Bieniemy's time in the league.

Right now, the Bears, the Dolphins, the Vikings, the Texans and the Raiders all have head coaching vacancies.

So far, Eric Bieniemy has been interviewed a grand total of one time.

Maybe it's timing that's getting him passed over. Maybe it's that he's not the right fit, although plenty of teams have opted for plenty of horrendous fits in the last 17 years.

Or maybe, at least partly, it's that he's black. 

I bring this up not because I'm trying to start something, or to make people uncomfortable who clearly aren't interested in any narrative that makes them uncomfortable (See; All the hysteria about Critical Race Theory, the advanced law school study that allegedly is terrorizing your fifth-grader). I bring it up because it's Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and thus seems relevant.

These days King, and his legacy, get co-opted too easily by those who would have locked him up and called him a communist back in the day. They love his signature quote about a man being judged by the content of his character, but miss the part where he acknowledges that in 1960s America it was mostly wishful thinking -- i.e. a dream. 

And in 2022?

A lot has changed, but too much hasn't. If there are spiritual descendants of King still calling out racial inequality in 2022, the faction that damned him as an enemy of America has its own spiritual descendants. And they don't want to hear about the darker side of our racial legacy -- or about black America, period -- any more than their '60s brethren did.

And as for progress in judging a man by the content of his character in the NFL?

That work remains unfinished, too. In fact, after the firings of David Culley in Houston and Brian Flores in Miami this month, the NFL now has exactly as many black head coaches (one) as it did when Fritz Pollard became the first black head coach in NFL history -- in 1921.

And so the struggle is ongoing, and men like Bieniemy are part of it. A century and a year after Fritz Pollard, something the first black general manager in NFL history once said remains true.

If you're black in America, Ozzie Newsome observed, you have to be twice as good as everyone else to achieve the same things.

True when King led the marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. True today, apparently.