Op-Ed: Newsweek: Racism in the Name of Equity Isn’t the Answer

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You may have seen the headlines this month about the NFL using something called “race norming” to make it more difficult for Black former players to qualify for any compensation from the $1 billion concussion settlement fund.

Make no mistake—using race to deny people what they are owed, as the NFL’s legal team in charge of administering the settlement did in this case, is an unconscionable form of racism.

But what you may not have heard from woke media outlets is that the “race-norming” used by the NFL was actually created by the Left more than a generation ago as part of its racial equity agenda.

President Jimmy Carter’s Labor Department claimed the General Aptitude Test Battery used by many state employment agencies unfairly measured Black applicants’ cognitive abilities. The department began to adjust the test scores of Black applicants so that the average Black applicant’s score matched the average white applicant’s score.

Congress managed to ban the government use of “race norming” in 1991, but as a private entity, the NFL was allowed to keep the policy. In the concussion suit, the league used it to claim that lower cognitive scores of some Black former-NFL players are lower because the cognitive tests themselves were racist, not because the players had suffered cognitive impairment from playing football.