White domestic abusers get a second chance. Ray Rice is black, so he won't

In Alabama, federal judge Mark Fuller still has his job, despite entering into a plea deal that will expunge from his record his arrest last August for beating his wife – “He’s beating on me. Please help me,” the woman is heard on an audiotape pleading with an emergency dispatcher – if he completes a counseling program.

There’s a playboy tech multimillionaire, Gurbaksh Chahal, who has raised capital and hired executives for a new venture after he was ousted from his position as CEO at RadiumOne last April following a guilty plea to two misdemeanor counts of domestic battery and battery after a half-hour attack on his then-girlfriend captured on security video that reportedly showed him beating and kicking her 117 times. (He had faced 45 felony counts, but the guilty plea netted him three years probation, and orders to report to a domestic violence counseling program.)

But it is disgraced NFL star Ray Rice – who pleaded no contest and entered a pretrial intervention program after punching his then-fiancée and now-wife, Janay Palmer Rice, in a hotel elevator (which was notoriously caught on camera and leaked to TMZ) – who can’t as of yet get back his old job in football with the Baltimore Ravens or find a new one with another team.

Ray Rice’s experience shouldn’t come as a surprise. This is another consequence of race in America.

Unlike Fuller and Chahal, Rice – who was cut by his team and suspended indefinitely by the league in September – is black. In the United States, black men with criminal convictions (or plea deals) are more than twice as unlikely as white counterparts to get an opportunity at re-employment, let alone hold onto their old jobs.

It doesn’t matter that Rice had no past record of violence. It doesn’t matter that he had no police record. It doesn’t matter that he wasn’t a failure of the criminal justice system who avoided jail by getting special treatment. As a first-time offender, he was eligible for a year-long diversionary program, which, if he violates, can send him back into the court.

“In surveys with employers, I’ve asked them how their views would compare in considering an applicant with various kinds of convictions,” Harvard professor Devah Pager, who has produced seminal studies on crime, punishment, race and employment, told me via email on Monday. “Drug crimes are the least serious, followed by property crime and then violent crime. That latter category, which would include domestic violence, appeared to be the most stigmatizing of all. I can’t say how those views interact with race, but I suspect the results would follow those of my earlier studies.”

It doesn’t matter that President Barack Obama sent the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on a crusade against employers it suspected used criminal-background checks to the detriment of black job seekers. It doesn’t matter that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act starkly limits employment policies that exclude individuals on the basis of criminal conviction records, particularly when it comes to people of color, who are disproportionately likely to have had contact with the criminal justice system and historically have unemployment rates twice as high as white people.

The specter of race isn’t likely to be raised Tuesday afternoon at the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, where its chair, retiring Senator Jay Rockefeller, has scheduled a hearing on domestic violence in professional sports featuring representatives from the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NHL and all the players’ unions for those sports – save that of the NFL’s players. The NFLPA, which declined to attend the Senate hearing, last week won an appeal to overturn what a judge agreed was an arbitrary suspension of Rice.

“That is the fair and legally correct result,” Rice’s attorney Peter Ginsberg said in a statement. “On a professional level, it is time for Ray to prove himself again,” he added.

“Hopefully, the NFL will use this incident to learn and to improve ... the NFL ignored for years the need to create a stronger and more constructive program to address domestic abuse.”

As disturbing as it is that the NFL turned a blind eye to a critical social issue, the league also ignored the interplay of racial discrimination and fairness in employment when it allowed mob rule en masse to dictate its discipline of Rice. The NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell allowed transient public outrage to essentially bar someone for life from practicing what he is good at, in the sole industry in which they are marketable, and turned a spouse and child into collateral damage.

The NFL reminds us that sports in this country isn’t always in the vanguard of change, but instead often mimics the status quo. The most powerful business in American sports – and it is a business – had an opportunity with Rice’s punishment to finally become a leader against the history of disparate treatment of offenders who are black. But the NFL, as usual, turned out to be a laggard.