How can you say “End Racism’ in your end zones when you are doing racist activities?
The NFL has made a lot of hashtags and empty gestures, but behind the scenes, they were making black NFL players’ families weren’t getting paid in the concussion settlements.
If the media didn’t expose it, it would still be happening.
It has been more than a year since Black former players seeking payments from the landmark NFL concussion settlement first drew attention to the use of race-norming, a controversial practice in neuropsychology in which Black patients’ cognitive test scores are curved differently than White patients’ scores.
The NFL publicly pledged in June to remove race-norming from the settlement. But the league and its lawyers have continued to defend the practice in public statements and court filings. Race-norming did not make it harder for Black players to qualify for payouts, the NFL has asserted.
If any dementia claims were affected by race-norming, the NFL has said, they were only “a fraction” of the hundreds alleged by former players’ lawyers. Race-norming is not required under the settlement, the league has said, and any doctors who believe otherwise are wrong.
The Washington Post points out several players that would have been awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases millions if not for the race-norming tests.
The NFL is still saying that nothing they did was wrong.
The NFL also said that there is nothing problematic in the 650k emails, and they also noted that CTE didn’t exist. They aren’t the most reliable narrator.
Sadly, some of these players have lost their lives, and their families are just scraping by when the NFL makes BILLIONS.
It isn’t surprising, though, because the NFL has always seen black bodies as disposable.
Flip the page for a video breaking down how the NFL used race-norming.