Stickers on NFL helmets just empty gestures
This season, the NFL will again present its version of social justice as platitudes stencilled on turf and slogans in small print on the back of football equipment. Once again, the league thinks these empty gestures will be enough to cover up the injustice imposed upon its own players.
Just like last year, the messages “End Racism” and “It Takes All Of Us” will appear in end zones. So each time Tom Brady passed for a touchdown Thursday against the Cowboys, he was dismantling the 400-year-old institution of hate and discrimination in the United States. Racism is over, everyone! Go Bucs!
And when the camera zoomed into the Cowboys' huddle, squinting fans just might have seen the words “Black Lives Matter,” a phrase that once defined an inspired movement but now has been reduced to a helmet decal. Surely, this is why Colin Kaepernick knelt.
The NFL'S nod toward racial and social justice, or at least the watered-down activism beloved by corporations, would be a bit more believable if the league showed more compassion for the lives of Black former players. Instead, this mistreatment emphasizes the ways in which the NFL still doesn't take responsibility for the inequity it dishes out.
Last month, a group of former NFL players, most of them Black, delivered a formal complaint to the Justice Department.
They want an investigation into whether the civil rights of ex-players were violated in the settlement of former players' class-action concussion lawsuit against the league. When the settlement was finalized in 2017, the NFL agreed to pay out huge sums, as high as US$5 million, to players who were diagnosed with brain diseases connected to the game. However, it has come to light that a number of Black players with dementia have found it difficult to qualify for payouts, in part because the process basically required doctors to “racenorm” cognitive tests administered in the claims process.
To qualify for a payout, former players have to endure a battery of cognitive tests proving they are suffering from dementia. Because African Americans tend to score lower on some neurological tests, doctors sometimes apply “African-american normative corrections” to the scores of Black patients. It's a controversial practice designed to avoid misdiagnosing healthy people.
Though the league alleged the examining doctors had the final say, a Washington Post investigation revealed the NFL and lawyers for ex-players constructed a system in which doctors were effectively forced to use race-norming, making it harder for Black players to qualify.
In June, the league and the lead attorney for the more than 20,000 former players in the suit pledged to remove race-norming from the settlement process. Also, a judge appointed a mediator to look into the situation. But imagine how the five players involved with the petition to the Justice Department feel seeing “End Racism” on the turf when they believe their former employer tried to trample on their civil rights.
And if you're Rick Cunningham — an otherwise physically healthy 54-year-old former player who couldn't remember the word for a “pool cue” — how would you react to the NFL'S pledge to donate US$250 million to its “Inspire Change” campaign when the league's lawyers fought you over your $700,000 payout?
It's easy to mock and disregard acts of social awareness, or to heap too much praise on sports leagues for finally taking a moral, if also a bit convenient, stand.
But when the NFL tries to show a heart and enter this arena, the reaction should be clear and unwavering: This is not enough.