NFL’s ‘Race-Norming’ Deprived Black Players of Payouts for Concussion Claims

A report from the Washington Post this week exposes the NFL’s controversial practice of “race-norming” the cognitive scores of former players, which affected payouts in the league’s concussion settlement. Many Black former footballers and their families allege they’ve been deprived of a significant amount of money. While the league promised this June to remove race-norming—adjusting cognitive test scores based on someone’s race or ethnicity—from the payments owed to players, confidential law and medical records obtained by the Post reveal that the practice significantly disadvantages Black players. Former Houston Oiler Johnnie Dirden was told that he would’ve met the NFL’s definition for a dementia diagnosis had he been white—and that he would have qualified for a six-figure payment. Other families struggled to get help for Black former players even as the league’s criteria disqualified them from a dementia diagnosis and from receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Doctors who worked for the league thought they had to race-norm scores and often got pushback from the NFL’s lawyers. Brad Karp, the league’s lead lawyer, argued that race-norming didn’t “affect the potential dementia claims of Black claimants” but added that the league agreed to eliminate the practice “because they have recently been called into question in many areas of medicine, including in the Settlement Program, and the NFL is committed to driving positive change, even ahead of the field of neuropsychology at large.”