FORMER SAN FRANCISCO 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was presented Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience award this spring—previous winners have included Nobel Prize winners such as Nelson Mandela and Malala Yousafzai—for “his refusal to ignore or accept racial discrimination.” Kaepernick’s “take a knee” protests against police violence sparked a movement, across football and other sports, and they rest upon a rich tradition of athletes who have stood up for justice in the broader society.
Our cover feature this month looks at one of the pre-eminent justice issues for the players themselves, particularly in football: brain injuries. We talked with Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who discovered pervasive brain trauma in NFL players. Omalu, whose research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, was chronicled in the 2015 Will Smith movie Concussion, argues in his latest book, Brain Damage in Contact Sports, that no child under 18 should play football. The increasing body of evidence, Omalu says, shows that 100 percent of people who play the sport are at risk of head trauma. For Omalu, a committed Catholic, there are clear moral issues at stake, especially concerning youth football. “We shouldn’t let children play, because we are damaging their brains and robbing them of their humanity. That is a fact.”
While Omalu’s groundbreaking work obviously has the potential to revolutionize how parents—and therefore how the country—approach athletics, his story is not one to be relegated to the sports pages. With stakes this high, such injustice anywhere, including on the fields of competition, cries out for response even from those with otherwise little interest in what goes on under the Friday night lights.
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