Update (Oct. 22, 2021): The NFL has agreed to end a race-norming system used to determine which former players can receive compensation for brain injuries. The previous testing system, which made it difficult for former Black players to qualify for awards in the $1 billion settlement of concussion claims, will now be revised, the Associated Press reports.
Use of an antiquated scoring algorithm meant Black retirees were presumed to have lower cognitive skills than white players. Now, they can have their tests rescored or ask for a new cognitive test, according to the new settlement.
"No race norms or race demographic estimates — whether Black or white — shall be used in the settlement program going forward," the settlement stated.
NFL veterans Najeh Davenport and Kevin Henry brought attention to the issue when they filed a lawsuit. The former players and their lawyers negotiated with the NFL for months before reaching the settlement that was reported on Wednesday. According to the athletes’ attorneys, white men were qualifying for awards at two or three times the rate of Black men due to the archaic race-norming system.
"The NFL should be really enraged about the race-norming. That should be unacceptable to them and all of their sponsors," said Roxanne "Roxy" Gordon, the wife of an impaired former player, AP reports.
Original (June 3, 2021): The NFL is pledging to cease its use of race-norming after being accused of systemic racism for the methodology that was used to determine which former players were eligible to receive compensation for brain injuries.
Retired NFL players can receive as much as $5 million if it can be proven that they've experienced severe brain trauma because of constant contact made during their day on the gridiron.
The archaic scoring algorithm that the NFL deployed and insisted upon, according to the terms of the settlement, suggested that Black men have lower cognitive skills than white players from birth, ABC 7 reported. The assertion was accused of impacting the amount that former Black players can claim from the NFL’s settlement.
“This is classic systemic racism,” Ken Jenkins, a former NFL player who advocates for retired Black players, said, according to The Hill. “Just because I'm Black, I wasn't born with fewer brain cells.”
Now, the NFL says it will be applying a new testing regime "prospectively and retrospectively for those players who otherwise would have qualified for an award but for the application of race-based norms," the Associated Press reported.
Newsweek reported that the NFL’s $1 billion settlement, which is being led by Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody, was handed 50,000 petitions on Friday by Jenkins, and his wife Amy Lewis. The petitions demand equal treatment in the evaluation of Black football players' cognitive skills, the only indicator used to disburse the settlement awards.
"Because every Black retired NFL player has to perform lower on the test to qualify for an award than every white player. And that's essentially systematic racism in determining these payouts," said Katherine Possin, a professor of neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.
Jenkins believes that the NFL is using race norming and claiming that Black players have lower cognitive abilities as a way to deny the players what’s owed to them
"Race-norming may have had a benign origin, but it quickly morphed into a tool that can be used to help the folks in power save money," he claimed.
According to Psychology Research and Reference, “Race norming is the practice of converting individual test scores to percentile or standard scores within one’s racial group. In the process of race norming, an individual’s percentile score is not calculated in reference to all persons who took the test; instead, an individual’s percentile score is determined only in reference to others in the same racial group.”
“Norming by race is not the stance that the NFL ought to take. It continues to look as if it's trying to exclude people rather than trying to do what's right, which is to help people that, clinically, have obvious and severe disability," Dr. Art Caplan, a medical ethicist from New York University, said.
Of all the 20,000 retirees from the NFL, most are Black, and only around 500 of 2,000 men who sought compensation were deemed eligible, according to the testing guidelines.
Attorneys representing the Black players have asked for details on how the $800 million in settlement payments have been disbursed by race, but have yet to receive them.
