Jay Nordlinger did an interesting "Impromptus" yesterday regarding the racial silliness currently taking place in the NFL.

The column deals mostly with the $200,000 fine the league levied against Detroit Lions president Matt Millen, who hired Steve Mariucci to fill his head coaching opening without first interviewing any "minority" candidates. According to a relatively new rule in the NFL, for each coaching opening, a team must now interview at least one "minority" candidate (I keep putting it in quotation marks because, as Nordlinger points out, "'minority' is merely a euphemism for black. We're not talking about Vietnamese or Inuit coaches here").

It was widely known around the NFL that Millen coveted Mariucci, and there was little question as to whom he would hire once Mariucci became available. Because everyone knew Mariucci was his guy, each of the black "candidates" who received Millen's obligatory call refused to be interviewed for the job. According to Nordlinger, players union chief Gene Upshaw (who is black) foresaw this eventuality back when the silly rule was being considered, saying "it will lead to sham interviews and sham lists [of coaches]."

I've talked about this sort of nonsense frequently, most recently in connection with the Supreme Court's awful ruling in the University of Michigan case. But Nordlinger provided another strong example of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" (to use President Bush's excellent phrase) which begs to be passed along. As Nordlinger relates the story:

An infamous and signal event occurred in 1989. In that year, a couple of Detroit reps in the Michigan state legislature threatened to withhold funding for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra unless it hired an additional black player, pronto. (The orchestra had only one.) The DSO — like all other self-respecting orchestras — had always had blind auditions. You play behind a curtain: They can't see you. They're not supposed to tell whether you're young or old, a man or a woman, or whatever.

But that was the problem, as far as the racialists were concerned. So, the symphony extended an offer to a black bassist, who, to his shame, accepted. He said, "I would rather have auditioned like everybody else" — but he didn't. Black musicians all over the world were outraged; they felt kicked in the stomach, as, in a way, they had been. A black trombonist in the Atlanta Symphony observed, "It doesn't do any good for players' self-esteem if they feel the rules were bent for them."

Nordlinger continues:

In time, the DSO approached conductor James DePriest to be its music director. (DePriest is black, and, in fact, the nephew of the great American contralto Marian Anderson.) DePriest told them, in so many words, to shove it: "It is impossible for me to go to Detroit because of the atmosphere. People mean well, but you fight for years to make race irrelevant, and now they are making race an issue."

Now, the present issue is complicated a bit by the fact that the NFL does have a dubious history with regard to racial issues. For years, NFL teams' avoidance of black quarterbacks in the annual draft was almost comical. Players like Warren Moon and Charlie Ward were either undrafted or drafted in the final rounds, while stiffs like Heath Shuler regularly rolled off the assembly line straight into the league.

You can say "Well, Kurt Warner didn't get drafted either, and look at him!" But Warner is an anomaly who went to a nothing college and of whom nobody inside or outside the league had ever heard before the Rams gave him a desperation shot. Warren Moon, on the other hand, was a star quarterback at a Pac 10 school (and was the MVP of the Rose Bowl), yet had to prove himself for years in the Canadian Football League before even getting a chance in the NFL. Despite losing years to the CFL, Moon still put together a Hall of Fame career in the NFL once he got the shot.

The barrier was finally broken a couple of years ago, with Steve McNair, Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper, and a number of other black quarterbacks being given a legitimate shot right out of college. But the overall NFL record has been poor, and hard to find an innocent explanation for.

Still, the fact remains that even where racial bias does exist, race-based preferences never provide a solution. Instead, they lead to a sham dog-and-pony show which encourages dishonesty and casts suspicion on those who have attained their positions through talent and hard work. If the NFL still has a problem in this area (which is arguable), they will have to find a different way to solve it. The "one-interview rule" might satisfy shakedown artists like Jesse Jackson and Johnnie Cochran, but it ultimately serves to hurt, rather than help, the situation.