Engineering Ethics

In light of Saturday’s tragic murder of Kasandra Perkins by Kansas City Chiefs’ linebacker Jovan Belcher, followed shortly by his suicide, I found the implications of JD21Dougherty’s blog entry “The Invisible Injury” important to discuss. JD21Dougherty contends that technological augmentation could help prevent harm to those people who engage in violent or highly energetic activities, such as professional sports. I don’t think he goes far enough. Class and race play an important part in American sporting culture, where most of the players in the NFL are people of color, and playing professional sports is seen as a ticket to rapid upward mobility. If the public resists the benefits of health to players and their families because they prize the authenticity of the game more than the welfare of players and their families, they are supporting institutionalized racism and privilege.



When working in a climate of institutionalized injustice such as racism frameworks in the USA, it is important to pay attention to race in the discussions where it has been relevant. The day after JD21Dougherty’s post, news broke of the murder-suicide in Kansas; and public opinion began to circulate about the nature of the relationship between the victim and perpetrator, mostly based on scant information and lots of conjecture. Accusations were made against both Perkins and Belcher; that she was a gold-digger, that she had provoke the attack, and according to the sports news site deathspin she was “the catalyst” for her own murder.


 Accusations against Belcher ranged from indictments of all athletes as promoting a culture of misogyny and violence, to Bob Costas' broadcast on Sunday Night Football. Avoiding domestic violence altogether, Costas instead chose to address gun control. Yet the elephant in the living room was the most powerful argument for Josh's suggestion of technological augmentation—Belcher was subject to multiple Traumatic Brain Injuries during his career in the NFL—injuries that, repeated over time, result in behavior change, personality shift, loss of higher reasoning, general cognitive impairment, dementia, depression and seizures among other more severe effects. In Belcher’s case, discourse has turned to TBI as a root cause of Belcher’s violent behavior. And he’s not the first athlete to succumb, if so.
 
 

Attention turned to the role of TBI in professional US athletics with the 2007 death of wrestler Chris Benoit, who suffocated his wife and child before taking his own life. His death had come around the same time as a rash of suicides in the NFL, a worrisome trend that led the Sports Legacy Institute; a group dedicated to “the study, treatment and prevention of brain trauma in athletes and other at-risk groups,” according to their website; to include Benoit’s brain in the samples of the dead NFL players’. All the brain tissue showed signs of specific injury attributed to repeated, massive trauma, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Brain tissue stains showing CTE evidence (image courtesy of Boston University)

 

 

 






Sunday, the Boston Globe reported on a newly concluded study from the Boston University School of Medicine, where researchers autopsied 85 brains (mostly from professional athletes) and found CTE throughout the samples—including the two brains from autopsied high school athletes. The study focused on charting the progression of CTE, which may progress for some time after the initial concussive impact. According to the Globe’s report “It starts with headaches and problems with concentration in the early stages, followed by depression, aggression, explosive anger and short-term memory loss. Then comes more serious cognitive impairment, and eventually full-blown dementia where a person doesn’t recognize loved ones.” The disorder was first suspected in the early 1920s, in early professional boxers. Mohammed Ali is believed to have CTE, previously characterized as Dementia Pugilistica. 

There are many sports fans who question whether there is still a race problem in American sports, claiming that racism is over since the players are integrated. Yet there are many facets of racism just as there are to any institutional power differentials. There may be many people of color playing in the NFL, but the folks calling the shots on the field and in the halls of power are typically still white males.  According to the Race and Gender Report Card issued by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, most of the players in the NFL are African-American, but the majority of upper and middle management are and have been white. There have never been any CEO's of color in the NFL as of 2011. 

The question of augmentation being questionable for reasons of authenticity of the sport is, in the face of the human tragedy of CTE and resultant family and community violence, appalling. This caveat becomes even more problematic given the disproportional targeting of recruitment for sports and military groups in minority communities, as a vehicle for class mobility and citizenship. Similar effects of CTE and TBI in military contexts have been established for some time, and are theoretically contributing to the massive numbers of military suicide casualties. The caveat of sport authenticity can easily be read as people of privilege watching people of less privilege harm themselves, each other, and their families for entertainment value.

While in college, Jovan Belcher signed a pledge for Male Athletes Against Violence, a group at the University of Maine that focuses on domestic violence. Although this element of Belcher’s past has been limned as irony, its far more telling in terms of his change in attitude after being repeatedly bashed in the head.

Although some outliers resist the growing tide of consensus on TBI and CTE linkage, professional sports groups are beginning to accept the correlation and conduct further studies into how to prevent harm to athletes, and their wives and kids. Yet their efforts meet with resistance from the very fans who claim to love sports. The players who are typically young men of color, can expect to play for about 15 years after college if they get recruited. Unless they are hired as coaching staff or elsewhere in the professional sporting pantheon--a proposition which is statistically rare--they must reeducate themselves or find another line of work.  Their families' well-being also hangs in the balance.  The integrity of the game may be important, but it is also measured in the well-being of the people who play it and the culture of sports, not just the appearance of authentic risk and damage.