NFL reviewing Black players’ injury claims after bias charges

Black former American football players say the league used ‘race-norming’ to make it harder for them to receive legal damages.

The National Football League (NFL) has pledged to halt the use of “race-norming” – a process that assumed Black players started out with lower cognitive functioning – when deciding whether to provide retired players with compensation for brain injury claims. The standards were designed in the 1990s in hopes of offering more appropriate treatment to dementia patients, but critics faulted the way the NFL used them to assess legal damages, saying it was harder for Black American football players to show a deficit and qualify for an award. Wednesday’s announcement comes after a pair of retired Black players filed a civil rights lawsuit over the practice, which had been used to determine payouts as part of a $1bn settlement reached between the NFL and players in 2013.