Brain Damage and Statistical Racism in the NFL
Race-norming is blatant racism, and it’s being used to award Black players with less compensation for their brain injuries.
When Amon Gordon began his NFL career with the Cleveland Browns in 2004, he never thought it’d lead to dementia. After a prolific but short career playing for a handful of teams, Gordan, at the young age of 40, is unable to work and is now among more than 20,000 former football players seeking compensation from the league for brain injuries received while active. Unfortunately for Gordon and other Black players (the clear majority of both active and retired players), getting adequate compensation involves first proving you’re more intelligent than the NFL assumes.
Gordan’s dementia diagnosis qualifies him for compensation, yet his claims have been rejected twice for unspecified reasons. He and his wife Roxy suspect a bizarre practice called race-norming might be at play.
CTE, the NFL’s Dirty Little Secret
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a condition in which the brain continually degenerates due to long-term trauma, such as that sustained during football and other contact sports. In some cases, such as Amon Gordan’s, CTE can result in dementia at a relatively young age, leaving a person unable to function normally.
Today, it seems fairly obvious that slamming your head into a trained 300 pound linebacker dozens of times a day for a solid decade would lead to serious brain injuries, but the NFL only acknowledged that their players were at risk after being sued and losing in August 2013. Despite denying that they had ample evidence, a bit of research shows that the NFL was fully aware of the risks for years, beginning in the early 1990s.
For example, in January 1994, shortly after halftime of the NFC Championship game, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman received a knee to the head from Dennis Brown, a defensive end for the 49ers. Later on he explained to reporters that “I didn’t know what planet I was on. I still to this day have no recollection of ever having played in that game. So whenever I see footage of that game, it’s like somebody else is out there doing it.” Later that year Merrill Hoge retired claiming that “This is messing with your brain.” A few weeks before he had also taken a knee to the head, leaving him unable to recognize his wife.
Despite Aikman, Hoge, and other players coming forward, the NFL remained in denial. For example, they created the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee for a public show of concern, yet they placed Dr. Elliot Pellman at the head, despite not having any relevant experience. When confronted by reporters about the risk of concussions, he downplayed it by saying that “concussions are part of the profession, an occupational risk.” NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue blamed journalists for creating a problem that didn’t exist. “On concussions, I think is one of these pack journalism issues, frankly… There is no increase in concussions, the number is relatively small… The problem is a journalist issue.”
Unfortunately for the players, this pattern of increasing evidence and denial continued, leaving many players to suffer. For some, the suffering was more than they could endure. In 2005, Terry Long committed suicide by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters killed himself shortly after in 2006. A few years later in 2011, Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest. His last text message asked for doctors to examine his brain. “Please, see that my brain is given to the NFL’s brain bank.” Ray Easterling and Junior Seau shot themselves a few years later. All of these tortured souls were diagnosed with CTE after death.
Despite the growing evidence, the NFL dragged their feet to do something about brain damage. It wasn’t until December 2009 that they admitted their players could be at risk. Spokesman Greg Aiello told The New York Times that “it’s quite obvious from the medical research that’s been done that concussions can lead to long-term problems.” The league also began to implement rule changes to protect their players and donate money to research, although these were minimal and largely ineffective. Quite bizarrely, the league produced a poster for locker rooms that explained concussions “may lead to problems with memory and communication, personality changes, as well as depression and the early onset of dementia. Concussions and conditions resulting from repeated brain injury can change your life and your family’s life forever.”
But it wasn’t until 2013 that the NFL began to pay out serious cash to the players for their brain damage as mandated by the court. However, the terms of the settlement stipulate that the league wouldn’t be forced to admit any guilt. Commissioner Goodell made sure to remind the public that he and other officials had done nothing wrong, despite the staggering amount of evidence to the contrary. He told the press that “There was no admission of guilt. There was no admission that anything was caused by football.”
Today, over 20,000 players are registered settlement class members and nearly $1 billion have been paid out, although Black players are being systemically discriminated against because the league assumes they’re less intelligent than their White counterparts.
Normalization and Race
Let’s say you’re an apple farmer that grows 2 types of apples, and you want to determine which type will be most affected by a new type of fertilizer. So you give each type the fertilizer and then measure them to see which is the largest. Certainly, the largest type was most affected by the fertilizer, right? Well, it’s possible, but we need more information, particularly the starting size of the apples. Maybe one type of apple is naturally smaller than the other. Maybe the largest apple in the end only seems like it was the most affected because it is the largest, while the smaller type doubled in size. We can’t determine the effect of the fertilizer unless we compare the size of the apples before and after it was applied.
This is the idea of normalization. When comparing changes in 2 groups, the data needs to be adjusted to take into account the starting conditions. If researchers want to determine how federal funding changed high-school graduation rates across income brackets, for example, they can’t simply look at which group had the most students receive a diploma. They need to first know how many students graduated before they received federal funding. In this example, the comparison is meaningless without first normalizing the data by assuming that different income brackets do not have the same graduation rates to start with. Data normalization like this is standard practice and isn’t usually controversial.
However, the NFL is in hot water because they’ve needlessly normalized the data on their players’ intelligence tests with the assumption that Black players are less intelligent than White players. That is, if a player is suspected of suffering from CTE, he is given an intelligence test, and if he scores significantly lower than what is expected, the results can be used as evidence of CTE. The problem, of course, is that the player’s expected results are an assumption. For reasons yet explained, the researchers administering these tests made different assumptions about players’ expected results based on race, making it more difficult for Black players to show enough of a cognitive decline to qualify for a payout. For example, if Player 1 scores a 60 on a test and researchers assume he should’ve scored an 80, then it shows a decline of 20 points. If Player 2, on the other hand, also scores a 60 but researchers assume he should’ve scored a 65, then it only shows a decline of 5 points. Therefore, Player A is far more likely to get a payout than Player B, due simply to the fact that researchers made different assumptions about them.
A lawsuit against the NFL alleges that Black players have been systematically discriminated against because of race-norming, making it harder for them to demonstrate mental decline on tests. Because of this, the league has agreed to immediately stop the practice and to review their methods of testing, although they again declined to admit any wrongdoing. Lawyers for the players, though, demanded all of the league’s information on race and how its used, implying they believe the problem could be worse than already known.
Hopefully, when the legal dust settles yet again around the NFL, it will be forced to the right thing, this time undoing decades of systematic racism by awarding Black players like Amon Gordon the money he is owed for his brain injuries.
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