NFL reveals need for critical race theory
As of June 2, the NFL has decided not to hold Black players to a lower mental bar than white players to prove they have brain damage.
Let me repeat that: In 2021, the NFL has decided former Black players may not be innately dumber than former white players.
That’s right. The governmentsupported football cartel that kicked off last season with only 3 of 32 teams having Black head coaches while roughly 70 percent of players are Black, and that features a “Remembering George Floyd” section on their homepage while discouraging players from taking a knee in protest of racial inequality, has decided that Black Americans are not inherently less mentally able than other Americans.
Good to know. Maybe we can finally say racism is over.
Of course, some people say that racism stopped being a problem in the United States long ago, but no one seems very clear about when. Maybe racism stopped with the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in 1865. Or maybe it ended with the 14th Amendment in 1868, which gave former slaves citizenship and made everyone regardless of race equal under the law. Or maybe it ended almost a century later with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race.
But if race has stopped being a problem why do Latinx and Black Americans experience more than twice white Americans’ rate of poverty? Why do Black men have more than twice the chance of being killed by police than white men? Why is the NFL only just now admitting that its Black players are not innately dumber than its white ones?
To answer those questions, you can either blame the victims or blame the system. You can say Black and Latinx people don’t work as hard or that they aren’t as smart or as able as whites. You can say that Black men should comply with police instructions more quickly. Attributing the same motivations, traits and actions to a racial group as a whole overlooks their individual differences at the same time that it makes these problems appear innate.
If instead you look deeper and blame the system, you can find causes and solutions. Could lower rates of white poverty be tied to generational wealth? After all, white families have roughly four times the median net worth of Black and Latinx families. Even if race isn’t a problem anymore, racial discrimination in housing and jobs was only outlawed two generations ago, within the lifespan of many of our parents and grandparents. In generational terms, there’s hardly been any time to close a wealth gap.
It’s these kinds of deeper analyses of racial inequality that have recently been labeled “Critical Race Theory” by some politicians. The roots of academic CRT date back to the 1960s and 1970s, and it was developed by legal scholars to explain how many U.S. laws inflicted more and greater punishments on non-whites than whites and were thus inherently racist. However, the term recently has been used very loosely to mean virtually any claim that a person or institution may be racist, especially unintentionally.
It’s this loose definition of CRT that the Texas Legislature has decided to outlaw teaching. On May 22, the Legislature passed a bill that bans teaching that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Of course, in using this language legislators reveal their perhaps purposeful misrepresentation of CRT. Academic CRT argues that institutions and people act in racist ways without knowing it, regardless of their own race rather than because of it.
The NFL’s recent decision to stop assuming Black players score lower on mental aptitude tests demonstrates how a person can unconsciously participate in a racist system. But the problem is deeper than the NFL. The NFL assumed Black players were not as smart as white players because neurologists told them Black Americans score statistically lower on the kinds of tests they were using to test for brain damage. The NFL applied “Heaton norms” to former players’ cognitive tests, and Heaton norms are race-based points of statistical comparison for health. What Heaton norms reflect, however, is different social and economic access to medical care and education, not innate racial differences. So they should not be applied to a group of workers in an industry, such as NFL players, whose access to education and health care tend to be more alike than different, regardless of race.
But the problem of race in health care is greater than just the misapplication of statistics. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that physicians don’t take Black patients’ pain as seriously as that of white patients and that they prescribe fewer and lower doses of painkillers to Black patients. Studies have also shown that teaching doctors about their own unconscious biases reduces the gap in painkiller prescribing.
This is why we need to teach Texans about unconscious racial biases. Racial biases exist, we can measure them, and we know that once people learn about them, they start to fix them.
But the idea that race might still be a problem is what the Legislature doesn’t want taught. That way teachers can get back to teaching “traditional history, focusing on the ideas that made our country great,” in the words of Texas Sen. Brandon Creighton of Conroe.
Teachers need the freedom to teach about how deeply embedded racism is in our country.
After all, Thomas Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal” while owning over 100 Black slaves. And the Supreme Court ruled that Black people weren’t American citizens in the Dred Scott case of 1857. And the U.S. government experimented on Black men for 40 years in Tuskegee, Ala., by purposefully not treating their syphilis. And today, Black and Latinx Americans are dying from COVID at roughly twice the rate of whites. If we’re not teaching the United States’ deep historical and persistent relationship with slavery and racism, are we teaching history at all?
We have to acknowledge our history if we are going to overcome our greatest challenges today. The Texas Legislature has tried to confuse us but the NFL has made things clear — racism has lived on in systems even when individuals are not conscious of it. Greater awareness is a first step to moving forward.