Jerod Mayo Was Right To See Race: "Wokeness" and (Actual) Critical Race Theory

New Patriots Head Coach Jerod Mayo caused a stir when he said, "If you don’t see color you can’t see racism." It upset people because fighting racism isn't as easy as turning off a switch.

Photo by Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The New England Patriots moved on from legendary coach Bill Belichick and hired former inside linebackers coach Jerod Mayo to be their head coach, a promotion that seemed inevitable if a little sooner than expected.

Mayo’s story is fascinating — he led the charge to reform the University of Tennessee’s locker room culture as a sophomore, earned praise from fellow Patriots as a rookie for his leadership and maturity and left football to enter the business world as an angel investor and boardroom member.

He’s been one of the few players to earn consistent public praise from Belichick during his playing career and was the first coach in Belichick’s long history to be hired directly into a position coaching role instead of serving time as a quality control coach, assistant position coach or as a prior position coach for a different NFL or college team.

His positioning as a head coach candidate isn’t new or surprising. Mayo had grown frustrated with what looked like limited room for advancement within the Patriots organization after taking on all the roles of a defensive coordinator except for gameday playcalling. While this was happening, he was not given the title of defensive coordinator.

The Patriots purportedly offered Mayo a co-defensive coordinator title but he turned it down, thinking he had already done more coordinating work than the nominal DC, Belichick’s son. A co-authorship of the defense would be inauthentic and seems insulting.

Instead, Mayo took head coaching interviews in 2021 and 2022 while open to defensive coordinator offers that allowed him to spread his wings. The Patriots were able to convince him to stay, and its been reported that the Patriots functionally promised him the ability to succeed Belichick after the legend retired or left the team.

The report is thorough enough to include details like an option clause to elevate him and a buyout in case the Patriots did not hire him into the role.

Mayo has deeply contemplated leadership and has shared his thoughts on the concept, citing leadership gurus and being active in the motivation mindset community.

To be clear, I don’t love that community — I think the leadership lessons are surface-level and they encourage a #grindset that pays lip service to community while ultimately being individualistic. But that’s not why the development of the Mayo story is interesting.

It would be far more preferable if this turned into a conversation about the crossover between the business leadership #grindset community and NFL coaching, a discussion well worth having. Instead, it became about something way stupider.

Jerod Mayo Does See Race

In his opening presser, Mayo mentioned the importance of “seeing race,” in a direct refutation to the colorblind approach often employed in these settings. What’s really fascinating — and not often mentioned as this story expanded — is that it directly contradicted the owner’s answer to the same question.

When asked if there was significance to the fact that Mayo was the team’s first Black head coach, owner Robert Kraft said, “Let me say this to you: I'm really colorblind … my passion is with the New England Patriots,” adding “Winning at the Patriots is my passion. I want to get the best people I can get. I chose the best head coach for this organization. He happens to be a man of color. But I chose him because I believe he's best to do the job.”

This is a pretty bog-standard answer and it seeks to avoid infantilizing a job candidate by suggesting they may be less qualified but were picked for something outside of their control.

There’s value in that, even as the “colorblind” statement misses a larger social context. Mayo spent a little bit of time detailing his response to that, in opposition to the owner — an unusual departure for these kinds of press conferences.

“You want your locker room to be pretty diverse, and you want the world to look like that. What I will say, though, is I do see color because I believe if you don't see color, you can't see racism,” Mayo said. He added, “Black, white, yellow, it really doesn't matter, but it does matter so we can try to fix the problem that we all know we have.”

The responses to Mayo’s answer, which was played on Twitter as its own segment, were overwhelmingly negative.

Many of the negative responses were generally pretty consistent in their tone — how can someone claim to be against racism but want people to be treated differently based on their skin color?

Common conservative themes popped up, too — that the Patriots were being “woke” or that DEI programs had infected the NFL.

Courtesy of news analyst Kat Abu, who specializes in covering right-wing news

As an aside, it should be noted that many assumed Fox News to be criticizing the Patriots for hiring a Black coach. Fox News has hardly earned the benefit of the doubt and racism can almost certainly be a motivating factor but their surface criticism revolved around Mayo’s words. Any argument that there is something deeper has to at least acknowledge their stated reasoning.

Colorblindness is a pretty common approach to combatting racism, and is generally easy to understand. It answers the core of how people understand racism — that people are treated differently because of their skin color — with its antithesis.

A simple definition will produce simple answers and it’s why people seemed to be talking past each other. There are dozens of critiques to this simple definition and to the simple answer, but it needs to be acknowledged that it’s appealing to have these kinds of answers.

Even the best-faith interpretation of “I don’t see color” — that it’s a metaphor that doesn’t refuse to acknowledge literal skin color or the existence of a social category of race, but a method of demonstrating that a hire is purely merit-based — still finds itself subject to meaningful critique.

It also needs to be acknowledged that language fails us here. As two authors — who we’ll bring up later — point out, we have heard the theory that the Eskaleut languages have a surprisingly large number of words for snow in order to capture multiple contexts and types.

But we here encounter the opposite problem: a complex, varied and large societal concept, racism, has essentially one word. And when people use it one way, others hear a different meaning.

With that in mind, we can understand that the original claim that colorblindness is the appropriate solution to racism betrays a particular understanding of the concept. If the solution to racism is as simple as turning off the racism switch inside one’s head, then one can pretend racism is active, conscious and isolated to unique events instead of part of a tapestry of experiences.

The idea that there is unexamined racism can be pushed to the side.

In short, how do we know that someone themselves knows that they don’t see color? It might seem like a patronizing question to ask of someone, but there’s a real reason to ask this.

Colorblindness and Unconscious Bias