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The NFL announced Wednesday it would no longer use “race-norming” as part of its calculus to determine which former players were entitled to compensation as part of a billion-dollar settlement on players’ traumatic brain injuries.
As a part of the 2017 settlement, the league was able to use so-called racial cognitive norms when evaluating the extent to which a player was suffering from the effects of a brain injury, which, in turn, determined the amount of compensation that player would get.
The racial aspect of that equation is as outrageous as you can imagine: the NFL compensation calculation was predicated on the theory that race could be used as proxy for a number of other socioeconomic factors in determining a baseline for cognition.
The practical result of the practice was that when assessing the harm done to a player, the NFL’s equation held that Black players started with lower cognitive function, which made impairment harder to prove and, in turn, compensation less likely to be paid than to white former players.
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