From ESPN:
Some clinicians tasked with evaluating the eligibility of former NFL players for compensation from the league's landmark 2013 concussion settlement worry that the testing process and protocols discriminate against Black players, an ABC News investigation published Wednesday has found.
The New York Times reported in August that two Black former players -- defensive end Kevin Henry and running back Najeh Davenport -- have filed a lawsuit against the NFL, accusing the league of "explicitly and deliberately" discriminating against Black players filing dementia-related claims.
At issue is a process called “race-norming,” which has been used by scientists for decades as a way to correct for the lower levels of education often found in minority communities. It was designed to prevent the overdiagnosis of cognitive impairment in these communities, but according to Henry and Davenport’s lawsuit, when applied to the NFL concussion settlement, it is having the opposite effect — making it more difficult for players to show cognitive decline.
No, race-norming is not having “the opposite effect,” it is having the same effect: it prevents “the overdiagnosis of cognitive impairment in these communities.” But we live in a Who? Whom? age, when the dominant question is “Is it good for the blacks?” So, to ESPN it seems like race-norming must be having the opposite effect, because (some) blacks want to have fewer blacks declared cognitively impaired in one case, while (some) blacks want to have more blacks declared cognitively impaired in the other case.
When former players file a claim for compensation, they undergo a battery of testing to measure their cognitive functioning. Those scores are compared against a baseline score, or “norm,” meant to represent a normal level of cognitive functioning. If the scores fall far enough below that norm, the player is eligible for compensation. But the norm for Black players is lower than the one for white players.
The underlying issue is the same one that brought UC Berkeley psychology professor Arthur Jensen into the study of IQ in the 1960s: Jensen was asked to look into the conundrum that IQ tests that had been found to be pretty accurate at confirming among whites that organically retarded “funny looking kids” with Down’s Syndrome and the like were, indeed, retarded, was puzzlingly identifying lots of normal-looking black kids who were accepted by other kids on the playground as normal as being retarded also.
Jensen’s investigation eventually determined that, indeed, a large fraction of whites who score under a 70 IQ are obviously organically retarded. On the other hand, because blacks average about a standard deviation lower in IQ, about one-sixth of blacks who don’t have Down’s Syndrome or the like score below 70. These are normal, healthy kids who just aren’t very bright.
The same issue came up in a 2002 Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, that nobody with an IQ below about 70 should be executed because, apparently, they are too dumb to understand “Thou shalt not kill.” Any relative of a Supreme Court Justice with an IQ below 70 is a Funny Looking Kid, but among the criminal element, normal people with IQs below 70 are not rare. An IQ score of 69 predicts future achievements as accurately for blacks as for whites, but the causes of the low IQ score tend to be different. The white kid is generally broken in some obvious sense, while the black kid is usually normal and healthy, just in the left part of the bell curve.
While adjusting for race is not a requirement for clinicians evaluating former players, according to ABC News, the manual outlining testing protocols recommends a “full demographic correction,” which includes age, gender and race.
I have a reasonable, constructive suggestion for what to do.
I’m highly sympathetic to the idea that the NFL give guys who knocked their brains out for my gladiatorial spectator pleasure be given some of the money they earned the NFL so they can be comfortable in their early dotage.
But, they don’t need to race-norm NFL players because they already have on record two different IQ-like test scores for each individual athlete before they entered the NFL.
So, just measure each plaintiff individually in terms of his decline from his IQ equivalent score at 18 and/or 22 years old.
Granted, I have no idea how they keep smart guys from successfully pretending to be dumb guys (Pat McInally, I’m looking at you), other than NFL players tend to be motivated by pride and dignity. But, assuming they’ve got that worked out, the NFL has no need to race-norm because they can individual-norm.
