NFL pledges to halt ‘race-norming,’ review Black claims

[Nichelle]

NFL vows to stop use of "race-norming" in reviewing brain injury claims - CBS News

The NFL on Wednesday pledged to halt the use of "race-norming" — which assumed Black players started out with lower cognitive function — in the $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims and review past scores for any potential race bias.

The practice made it harder for Black retirees to show a deficit and qualify for an award. The standards were created in the 1990s in hopes of offering more appropriate treatment to dementia patients, but critics faulted the way they were used to determine payouts in the NFL concussion case.
Wednesday's announcement comes after a pair of Black players filed a civil rights lawsuit over the practice, medical experts raised concerns and a group of NFL families last month dropped 50,000 petitions at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia — where the lawsuit had been thrown out by the judge overseeing the settlement.

Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody later took the unusual step of asking for a report on the issue. Black retirees hope it will include a breakdown of the nearly $800 million in payouts so far by race. They fear the data will never come to light.
"Words are cheap. Let's see what they do," said former Washington running back Ken Jenkins, whose wife, Amy Lewis, led the petition drive on behalf of NFL friends struggling with cognitive problems. Jenkins, an insurance executive, has so far been spared.
According to the NFL, a panel of neuropsychologists formed recently to propose a new testing regime to the court includes two female and three Black doctors.

"The replacement norms will be applied prospectively and retrospectively for those players who otherwise would have qualified for an award but for the application of race-based norms," the NFL said in a statement issued Wednesday by spokesman Brian McCarthy.
Lead players lawyer Christopher Seeger, who negotiated the 2013 settlement with the NFL, said earlier this year that he had not seen any evidence of racial bias in the administration of the settlement fund. He amended those remarks Wednesday, apologizing for any pain the program has caused.
"I am sorry for the pain this episode has caused Black former players and their families. Ultimately, this settlement only works if former players believe in it, and my goal is to regain their trust and ensure the NFL is fully held to account," Seeger said in a statement.
The NFL noted that the norms were developed in medicine "to stop bias in testing, not perpetrate it." And both Seeger and the league said the practice was never mandatory, but left to the discretion of doctors taking part in the settlement program. 

However, the NFL appealed some claims filed by Black players if their scores were not adjusted for race.

"If it wasn't for the wives, who were infuriated by all the red tape involved, it never would have come to be," Jenkins said of the attention being paid to the issue, three years after lawyers for former Pittsburgh Steelers Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport say they first raised it.
The binary race norms, when they are used in the testing, assume that Black patients start with worse cognitive function than Whites and other non-Blacks. That makes it harder for them to show a deficit and qualify for an award. Henry and Davenport, for instance, were denied awards but would have qualified had they been White, according to their lawsuit, which Brody dismissed in March, calling it an improper "collateral attack" on the settlement. They have appealed the ruling.
More than 2,000 NFL retirees have filed dementia claims, but fewer than 600 have received awards, according to the most recent report. More than half of all NFL retirees are Black, according to lawyers involved in the litigation.
The awards so far have averaged $516,000 for the 379 players with early-stage dementia and $715,000 for the 207 players with moderate dementia. Retirees can also seek payouts for Alzheimer's disease and a few other diagnoses. The settlement ended thousands of lawsuits that accused the NFL of long hiding what it knew about the link between concussions and traumatic brain injury.

[Guest]

I read that earlier today, it is absolutely grotesque. Kudos to the wives that lead the fight. This should not have been happening in the first place. So many deeply embedded biases that have such a damaging impact.

[Guest]

@Vikergirl said:
I read that earlier today, it is absolutely grotesque. Kudos to the wives that lead the fight. This should not have been happening in the first place. So many deeply embedded biases that have such a damaging impact.

Exactly. I'm thankful for their perseverance in bringing light to something so wrong. This article provides even more info:

Retired Black players say NFL brain-injury payouts show bias (apnews.com)

[Guest]

I had to reread the first paragraph to get it through my head that they were actually determining brain damage and payments by assuming black players were stupid to start with.  Apparently this story gave me dementia because I can't figure out what the hell to type now.

[Guest]

From the second article:

The NFL’s dementia testing evaluates a person’s function in two dozen skills that fall under five sections: complex attention/processing speed; executive functioning; language; learning and memory; and visual perception. A player must show a marked decline in at least two of them to get an award.
In an example shared with The Associated Press, one player’s raw score of 19 for “letter-number sequencing” in the processing section was adjusted using “race-norming” and became 42 for whites and 46 for Blacks.
The raw score of 15 for naming animals in the language section became a 35 for whites and 41 for Blacks. And the raw score of 51 for “block design” in the visual perception section became a 53 for whites but 60 for Blacks.
Taking the 24 scores together, either a white or Black player would have scored low enough to reach the settlement’s 1.5-level of early dementia in “processing speed.” However, in the language section, the scores would have qualified a white man for a 2.0-level, or moderate, dementia finding — but shown no impairment for Blacks.
Overall, the scores would result in a 1.5-level dementia award for whites — but nothing for Blacks. Those awards average more than $400,000 but can reach $1.5 million for men under 45, while 2.0-level dementia yields an average payout of more than $600,000 but can reach $3 million.
Breton Asken, a neuropsychology fellow at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, helped administer several assessments around 2016, when he was a student at the University of Florida. The assessments he was involved in took 4 to 6 hours, and produced a score, which would then be adjusted based on the Heaton norms.
“So the male Black athletes that we saw would be compared essentially to a group of otherwise healthy Black individuals with a similar number of years of education and of the same age,” Asken said.
Even at the time, he said he and his colleagues worried the assessments and adjustments were not appropriate.
“I think we were always hesitant to be robotic about this,” Asken said. “We understood from a legal standpoint why there’s a push and a need for making something a little more algorithmic and robotic, that it can be standardized and so forth. But I think there’s also a lot of challenges when you take expert clinical decision-making out of things.”
They would report the person’s level of impairment by the “letter of the law” and would also provide comments conveying “anything else we thought was relevant to the patient’s brain health, physical health, mental health and so forth that we thought would be important for us to include in something like a standard neuropsychological report.”
The test battery also included questionnaires about mood and personality. But those scores were not included in the algorithm to determine compensation, he said.
“They’re getting full neurologic exams from these neurologists who are able to pick up on other aspects of the nervous system that might be having problems and so forth. Feels very odd for us to put this comprehensive neuropsychological report together and just ignore those pieces of data,” Asken recalled.
“Norming by race is not the stance that the NFL ought to take,” said Dr. Art Caplan, a New York University medical ethicist. “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.” He noted that the long history of racial bias in medicine includes the long-held myth that Black people feel less pain.
“There’s always been this race-norming in medicine,” he said, “that has been problematic because it’s tied in too closely to racism.”
Jenkins, the former Washington player, believes it all comes down to money.
“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 said.
Yet Caplan is not alone in thinking there may be even more at play here: the future of the NFL.
“These may be fights to escape the conclusion that football’s too dangerous. That’s always looming in the background,” Caplan said. “That opens the door to a lot of moms saying ‘I’m not sure that’s the right sport for my kid.’”
In March, the same month Brody dismissed the civil rights lawsuit, the league announced an 11-year deal with TV partners worth $113 billion.
___

[Guest]

@RS Express said:
I had to reread the first paragraph to get it through my head that they were actually determining brain damage and payments by assuming black players were stupid to start with.  Apparently this story gave me dementia because I can't figure out what the hell to type now.

Me too. Me too.

[Guest]

The clear end result is that you'll have to take the tests before being allowed to be hired, so they'll have your personal baseline.  Probably lump it in with the Wonderlick during the draft.

[Guest]

“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 said."

This is the problem and exactly what happened. And what has happened forever with people in power and wealth the world over. 

[Guest]

Christopher Seeger said he had not seen any evidence of bias and then says 
"I am sorry for the pain this episode has caused Black former players and their families. Ultimately, this settlement only works if former players believe in it, and my goal is to regain their trust and ensure the NFL is fully held to account".

This episode?  First he lied then he gives this fake ass apology and wants to be trusted or regain trust. Seriously? It's gross all around. Hiding information about concussions is one thing, making absolutely disgusting assertions about a race of people is next level repulsive. Unfortunately this type of thing is still a thing in 2021 but people in power want to keep their power and money regardless of how they impact people's lives.

[Guest]

This is the kind of information that confirms my view that there is a systemic difference in how we treat each other.  It’s funny how money distribution always has some kind of role in it.