The Rooney rule is ineffective and may do more harm than good on balance, but is it racist? Ehhhh. For something, a policy, rule, institution, etc to be racist it needs to be enforced by and held up by a majority - ie: those in a position to benefit from and ensure the existence of the institution.
Here's an example. A black person makes fun of white people for not being good at dancing. This might be rude or even factually inaccurate in a few cases, but without the power to oppress, it's not racism. If in 100 years black people end up being the majority in the US, and consequently forced white people not to dance through violence and systemic oppression, that would be a textbook example of
racism with a capital R.
The Rooney rule was created by rich white guys, is enforced by rich white guys, and doesn't oppress anyone. It's largely benign and if anything makes a mockery of the NFL's attempts to promote diversity and equity - simply because it's so easy to manipulate.
The rule doesn't work so it should probably be scrapped, perhaps replaced with something that incentivizes diversity rather than punishes a lack of it. The draft pick rule that was introduced recently for coordinators and assistant coaches of color makes a little more sense to me. Though I'm not sure how effective that will be either.
In my view, the crux of the matter is that while the majority of the players are black, not all coaches are ex-players. Many work their way up through the college coaching system. Education and wealth, specifically generational wealth, play a big part in it. There are thousands of white coaches that have the sort of education and generational wealth that makes it possible for them to work their way up the coaching ranks, which means disproportionally more candidates on balance.
What does generational wealth have to do with it? Many coaching gigs, and especially entry-level ones at the college or NFL level are internships. Internships are often poorly paid or entirely unpaid. If you do not have the kind of generational wealth or support systems that many white people take for granted, getting into this line of work can be difficult. If you can afford to take what is effectively a hobby job, your chances of working your way up the ladder increase exponentially. On the other hand, if you have a family to feed and you're living paycheck to paycheck, you likely don't have the luxury of pursuing this sort of career. That's not to say there aren't poor white people that lack a support structure who are able to figure it out, but just that statistically speaking, black people are more likely to be living at or below the poverty line, and for numerous generations in a row. It's much rarer for white folks to be generationally poor. There's likely a good argument to be made about a relative lack of positive role models as well. As an example, black men are incarnated at much higher rates than white men, even for the same crimes. This means black kids often grow up without fathers, uncles, in many cases older brothers to look up to. And if you don't have good examples of what being a role model is, what dignity and leadership looks like, you're probably not going to get into a career where those are some of the job responsibilities.
Money comes into play with education as well. Black folks often have worse access to quality education, with inner-city schools frequently being some of the worst places in the country to get a good education - often because of the high levels of poverty, schools being funded by poor distracts and so forth. Our prohibitively expensive college-level education system doesn't help matters here.
Now, many ex-NFL players likely can afford these foot-in-the-door sorts of internships, and many have some sort of college education (often from a scholarship). So the barriers to entry are not as significant for ex-players, but that probably doesn't increase the odds as much as one might expect.
Backing up, not all coaches are former pro players, many didn't have much success at the college level, if they even played at all. So the coaching pool looks something more like highschool + college coaches and assistants + former players from various levels. Let's say 32 coaches, 32 GMs, and another 96 coordinator jobs. That's 160 high-level jobs in the NFL, but likely hundreds of thousands of coaching candidates at the lower levels. Most of those coaches are going to be white, at every level, because of socioeconomics where systemic racism plays a part, and well, regular old not-at-all-racist probability.
Oh, and then we have nepotism and run-of-the-mill prejudice, where even if there were two equally qualified and experienced candidates, the job is probably going to the white GM or white head coach's white buddy, aka the "known quantity", more times than not. It's not necessarily a sinister conspiracy where the head of the evil white guy guild explains his plan to prevent black men from getting jobs while stroking a long-haired cat - more likely it's hundreds, thousands of sub-conscience decisions, the sort that affects hiring in every industry.
At the end of the day, the spirit of Rooney rule is to promote equity rather than equality - which I'm sure some here object to. Equality means everyone gets the same opportunities, and in an ideal society there would be no need for something like the Rooney rule, affirmative action, etc. But we don't live in that world - if we did we would at least see non-white coaches at proportional rates to the general racial demographics. Which is to say about 14% black and 9% hispanic and significantly higher if we look at the demographics for NFL cities. Equity requires us to understand that not everyone has the same start in life or the same opportunities, and thus things like the Rooney rule attempt to level the playing field.
So, it's a well-intentioned but ineffective rule. One that attempts to solve or at least improve a complex problem that extends much further than the NFL. It's a little fool-hardy to think that a football league could affect this sort of change. I give it a B+ for sentiment and ambition and a solid F for execution.