'It’s morally unconscionable, most certainly politically unsustainable and legally indefensible,' said Harry Edwards, a sociologist and longtime staff consultant for the San Francisco 49ers.
The NFL is pledging to halt the use of ‘race-norming’ in the $1-billion settlement of brain injury claims and to review claims by Black players for any potential race bias.Harry Edwards, a sociologist and longtime staff consultant for the San Francisco 49ers, has spent a half-century studying the intersection of sports and society. He spoke Sunday to the Los Angeles Times about race-norming, what it suggests and what the NFL should do to repair the damage it has caused.
I’ve known about this since last August. When it first became an issue, I was contacted by some people who have been looking at this thing as a eugenics issue for quite some time. But the details of it didn’t start coming out until the NFL faced that lawsuit. Then as we got more and more into it, it became clear that this was simply unacceptable.
It’s morally unconscionable, most certainly politically unsustainable and legally indefensible. You can’t have 74% of the players in the league Black but when it comes to actually being able to claim access to funds resulting from brain damage, dementia, CTE, other kind of cognitive-deficit-inducing conditions that are directly related to football, all of a sudden there’s a different standard for them. There’s a presumption that they come in at a cognitively lower ranking. A lower baseline.
Some players say their requests to be included in the settlement were rejected with insufficient explanation. From your perspective, is that common among players?Of course. You just get a no. But when you go back to it and start digging into it, you find out that the whole situation is race-normed, where you have to show greater decline to get the same benefits that a white player does. Because the presumption is that as a Black player, you start with lower cognitive capability to begin with.
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