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From a Reader:

Concussion Decision Further Exposes Murderous, Thieving Racism of NFL Owners

“More than 300 Black former NFL [National Football League] players originally denied payments from the league’s massive concussion settlement now qualify for money or league-funded medical treatment, according to a report filed in federal court, following the elimination of controversial ‘race-norming’1 from the settlement.” (from the Washington Post, August 12)

In 2013, 4,500 current and former professional football players settled their lawsuit against the NFL for the brain injuries suffered by the players while they were playing football. The settlement was to pay the families of those players who are dead, for those players who are currently injured, for the players’ medical costs, and for the players’ attorney fees (see “NFL Concussion Settlement: $765 Million to Suppress the Truth About Brain Injuries” at revcom.us).

Attorneys for the Black players, who make up 70 percent of current players and 60 percent of retired players in the NFL, suspected that white players were qualifying for awards at two or three times the rate of Blacks since the payouts began in 2017. Because of this, in 2021, two former Black NFL players, Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport, sued the league for racial discrimination.

Their lawsuit stated: “Black former players are automatically assumed (through a statistical manipulation called 'race-norming') to have started with worse cognitive functioning than White former players. As a result, if a Black former player and a White former player receive the exact same raw scores on a battery of tests designed to measure their current cognitive functioning, the Black player is presumed to have suffered less impairment, and he is therefore less likely to qualify for compensation.”2

Yes, the NFL was using a racist medical practice to eliminate Black players from being compensated, and the NFL knew this in 2019 and did nothing to stop it, as payouts to deserving Black players would cost the league more if they did stop “race-norming.”

Sociologist Victor Ray put it this way: “Even with the NFL’s overwhelming financial prominence, race norming was one way the league could more closely moderate who was eligible (read: worthy) for a settlement. Yet, despite its contemporary uses, race norming can be traced back to plantation slavery, eugenics efforts globally and a long history of racial science used to justify the belief in inferior racial groups. These misguided scientific endeavors are rooted in an idea that Black people’s bodies are inherently different from white people’s bodies.”3 What Ray is describing is a method to use different measurements for Black people than any other race, which is nothing more than systematic racism.

When Henry and Davenport’s disclosure became public, a shitstorm of criticism hit the NFL. But Roger Goodell, the league’s Commissioner, refused to take any responsibility for the NFL’s racist practice. He said, “The courts are the ones that ultimately make the decisions about the processes that are used to evaluate players to receive benefits.” Brad Karp, the NFL’s attorney, claimed it was the doctors who decide to use race-norming, not the NFL. Goodell went on, “Yes, we think this should be changed if there are better processes.” Better processes??? What!! A better racist process?

See also:

Letter from a reader:
Damaging Report on Football Brain Injuries Prompts More Defections from Football—
Sport should not destroy mental health; it should promote health

As the outrage about “race-norming” continued, the NFL decided to backtrack. In June 2021, the league pledged to eliminate race-norming from the settlement process, but refused to take a stand against it. Here is what Karp said: “Race norms are being removed from the Settlement Program not because they have been found to make it ‘harder’ for Black individuals to qualify for benefits, but because the NFL believes the neuropsychological community can do better” (my emphasis).

Doctors who have participated in the settlement process have disputed Karp’s assertion that the doctors and the neuropsychological community are the responsible parties for race-norming. The Washington Post interviewed Charles Golden, a neuropsychologist and professor of psychology at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who said of Karp’s assertion, “That's just not true…. Whenever you didn’t [race-norm], and it made a difference, and the player qualified … they, BrownGreer [the law firm hired by the NFL to oversee the settlement payments] and the NFL, went after you.”4

Well, that shit is over for now. It has been reported that “Of the 646 Black men whose tests were rescored, nearly half now qualify for dementia awards. Sixty-one are classified as having early to moderate dementia, with average awards topping $600,000; nearly 250 more have milder dementia and will get up to $35,000 in enhanced medical testing and treatment.”5

The NFL “race-norming” has ended, and that’s a good thing. But this is a sports league that has a history of racism: racist team names, Black players banned until 1945, an unwritten quota for Black players in the 1940s and 1950s, refusing to allow Black players to play quarterback until the 1980s, Las Vegas Raiders’ head coach John Gruden’s racist emails, and currently being sued for racial discrimination by three current and former Black coaches. So stay tuned.

ba-seven-talks.jpg

 

From 7 Talks by Bob Avakian:

The NBA: Marketing the Minstrel Show and Serving the Big Gangsters
Track 1, Track 2

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FOOTNOTES:

1. “Race-norming” is a process of making adjustments to test results based on a person’s race. The practice has been mainly been used as it pertains to Black people. It was used by the government starting around 40 years ago when aptitude scores, as a part of federal job applications, were adjusted to account for the race and ethnicity of the person taking the test. It was an admission that these tests were in fact racially biased. The government ended the practice with the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

The government determined that it should adjust Black people’s job test scores up in order “to avoid unfairness.” Here is its rationale: “Majority [white] workers do comparatively better on the test than they do on the job, and so benefit from errors of false acceptance. Minority workers at a given level of job performance have much less chance of being selected than majority workers at the same level of job performance, and thus are burdened with higher false-rejection rates.... This outcome is at odds with the nation's express commitment to equal employment opportunity for minority workers. In the committee's judgment, the disproportionate impact of selection error [on minority workers] provides scientific grounds for the adjustment of minority scores.” (see Hartigan, J. A. and Wigdor, A. K. (eds.) (1989). Fairness in Employment Testing: Validity Generalization, Minority Issues, and the General Aptitude Test Battery, Washington, DC: National Academy Press.)

In medicine, race-norming has been used to adjust the diagnosis from test results and physical symptoms based on race. An example of this is that “The American Heart Association (AHA) Get with the Guidelines–Heart Failure Risk Score predicts the risk of death in patients admitted to the hospital. It assigns three additional points to any patient identified as ‘nonblack,’ thereby categorizing all black patients as being at lower risk. The AHA does not provide a rationale for this adjustment. Clinicians are advised to use this risk score to guide decisions about referral to cardiology and allocation of health care resources. Since ‘black’ is equated with lower risk, following the guidelines could direct care away from black patients. A 2019 study found that race may influence decisions in heart-failure management, with measurable consequences: black and Latinx patients who presented to a Boston emergency department with heart failure were less likely than white patients to be admitted to the cardiology service.” (see “Hidden in Plain Sight — Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms,” by Darshali A. Vyas, M.D., Leo G. Eisenstein, M.D., and David S. Jones, M.D., Ph.D. The New England Journal of Medicine, August 27, 2020.

In neuropsychology, doctors have needed to consider a patient’s background when determining if that patient is suffering from a brain injury or disease. Normal cognitive test scores for a healthy 85-year-old would register as impaired for a healthy 25-year-old. College graduates typically perform better on many tests of cognition than high school dropouts. It is true that there are socio/cultural factors that are a determinant of cognition. However, using race-norming of Black people as a biological entity with regards to cognition sets their cognitive baseline at a lower level than white people solely based on race. “The Human Genome Project has taught us that human beings are 99.9% similar at the DNA level, and the remaining 0.1% does not vary according to sociopolitically defined race categories such as Black or White.” (see “Perils of Race-Based Norms in Cognitive Testing: The Case of Former NFL Players,” by Katherine L. Possin, PhD, Elena Tsoy, PhD, and Charles C. Windon, MD. Journal of American Medicine, July 1, 2021) [back]

2. "The NFL’s Racist ‘Race Norming’ Is an Afterlife of Slavery," by Tracie Canada, Chelsey R. Carter, Scientific American, July 8, 2021 [back]

3. "The NFL’s Racist ‘Race Norming’ Is an Afterlife of Slavery," by Tracie Canada, Chelsey R. Carter, Scientific American, July 8, 2021. [back]

4. "How ‘race-norming’ was built into the NFL concussion settlement," by Will Hobson, the Washington Post, August 22, 2021 [back]

5. "More Black NFL retirees win dementia cases in rescored tests," by Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press, August 12, 2022 [back]

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