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ABSTRACT
This essay analyzes relationships between brain banking practices, football-related head trauma research, and the production of “racial biosocialities”—forms of group affiliation that are constituted through experiences of bodily suffering and shaped around racialized health disparities. The head trauma crisis raises questions about the sustainability of football that will require new strategies for managing the vitality of racial bodies while simultaneously warranting the consumption of harm to these same bodies. I argue that brain banking potentially supports these strategies by publicizing new systems for testing and prevention that reify neoliberal conceptions of personalized risk management and informed choice.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and Greg Dickinson for their guidance, and Jeffrey Bennett and Kathleen Bachynski for their help in preparing the manuscript.
Notes
1 Alan Schwartz, “Before Suicide, Duerson Said He Wanted Brain Study,” The New York Times, February 19, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/sports/football/20duerson.html.
2 Alan Schwartz, “N.F.L. Players Shaken by Duerson's Suicide Message,” New York Times, February 21, 2011.
3 Mike Lopresti, “Dave Duerson's Suicide Renews Questions about Football Safety,” USA Today, February 21, 2011, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/lopresti/2011-02-21-dave-duerson-suicide_N.htm.
4 Boston University School of Medicine, “VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank,” http://www.bu.edu/cte/our-research/brain-bank/ (accessed June 2, 2020).
5 The bank's samples are not randomly selected, and selection bias likely results in an overestimation of CTE prevalence among former football players. See Zachary O. Binney and Kathleen E. Bachynski, “Estimating the Prevalence at Death of CTE Neuropathology Among Professional Football Players,” Neurology 92, no. 1 (2019): 43–5, doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000006699
6 Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, “Study: New Cases of CTE in Players,” ESPN, December 3, 2012, http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/8697286/boston-university-researchers-discover-28-new-cases-chronic-brain-damage-deceased-football-players.
7 Jason M. Breslow, “76 of 79 Deceased NFL Players Found to Have Brain Disease,” PBS Frontline, September 30, 2014, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/76-of-79-deceased-nfl-players-found-to-have-brain-disease/.
8 Dan Diamond, “96% of NFL Players in BU Study Tested Positive for Brain Disease,” Forbes, September 18, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2015/09/18/96-of-surveyed-nfl-players-test-positive-for-brain-disease/1#4dc50f2b42db.
9 Felice J. Freyer, “‘It's Impossible to Ignore this Anymore’: CTE Study Details Devastating Toll on Football Players,” Boston Globe, July 25, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/07/25/boston-study-takes-deep-look-brain-disease-toll-football-players/nbIZoCfstF4FNwfslnwCPJ/story.html.
10 Daniel A. Grano, The Eternal Present of Sport: Rethinking Sport and Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 149–54; Derek Thompson, “The Fragile Dominance of the NFL,” The Atlantic, September 22, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/nfl-scandals-could-destroy-football-and-pay-tv/380568/.
11 Richard Lapchick, “The 2018 Racial and Gender Report Card: National Football League,” TIDES, January 23, 2019, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7d86e5_0fea53798fdf472289d0966a8b009d6c.pdf.
12 Alana Semuels, “The White Flight From Football,” The Atlantic, February 1, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/football-white-flight-racial-divide/581623/.
13 Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 6, 35.
14 Ibid., 8, 21.
15 Jonathan Xavier Inda, Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life (New York: Routledge, 2014), 45–6.
16 Paul Rabinow, “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality,” in Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 99–103; Sahra Gibbon and Carlos Novas, “Introduction: Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences,” in Biosocialities, Genetics, and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities, ed. Sahra Gibbon and Carlos Novas (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–3.
17 Gibbon and Novas, “Introduction,” 3.
18 Inda, Racial, 44.
19 Daniel S. Goldberg, “Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, the National Football League, and the Manufacture of Doubt: An Ethical, Legal, and Historical Analysis,” The Journal of Legal Medicine 34, no. 2 (2013): 184–5.
20 Inda, Racial, 43–6.
21 Ibid., 40.
22 Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, “Biological Citizenship,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 440–2.
23 Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The New Press, 2011), 210–11.
24 A full treatment of these works is beyond the scope of my essay, but my thinking is inspired by rhetorical studies on the intersecting racial scripts that constitute “citizenship” in the US. See, for example: Vincent N. Pham, “The Racial Matters of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 1 (2018): 95–7, doi: 10.1080/00335630.2018.1414294; Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 13–14; D. Robert DeChaine, ed., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012); Josue David Cisneros, “(Re)Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 1 (2011): 26–49, doi: 10.1080/00335630.2010.536564; and Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (2003): 362–87, doi: 10.1080/0739318032000142025.
25 Inda, Racial, 40–3.
26 Cathy Gere, “A Brief History of Brain Archiving,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 12, no. 4 (2003): 397.
27 Ibid., 408–9.
28 Ibid., 397.
29 Julie V. Hansen, “Resurrecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch,” The Art Bulletin 78, no. 4 (1996): 667, doi: 10.2307/3046214.
30 Gere, “A Brief,” 400–3.
31 Gere, “A Brief,” 407–8; Michael Bliss, Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 490–511.
32 Gere, “A Brief,” 408–9.
33 Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2013).
34 Grano, The Eternal, 174–82.
35 Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru, League, 450–1.
36 Ibid., 274.
37 Ibid., 274–5.
38 Ibid., 413–7, 442–50.
39 Ibid., 450.
40 Ibid., 451–7.
41 Concussion Legacy Foundation, “Sports Legacy Institute Announces Rebrand to Concussion Legacy Foundation,” September 3, 2015, https://concussionfoundation.org/about/media/press-releases/sports-legacy-institute-announces-rebrand-concussion-legacy-foundation.
42 Alan Schwartz, “N.F.L. Gives $1 Million to Brain Researchers,” The New York Times, April 21, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/sports/football/21dementia.html.
43 Alan Schwartz, “N.F.L. Overhauls Concussion Committee,” The New York Times, March 17, 2010.
44 Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru, League, 531–6.
45 Hal S. Wortzel, Robert D. Shura, and Lisa A. Brenner, “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and Suicide: A Systematic Review,” BioMed Research International 2013, no. 134 (2013): 1–6, doi: 10.1155/2013/424280.
46 Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru, League, 529–31.
47 Ibid., 536–7, 590–1.
48 Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, “Mind Control,” ESPN Outside the Lines, April 29, 2013, http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/page/JuniorSeau/mind-control; Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, “Congressional Report Says NFL Waged Improper Campaign to Influence Government Study,” ESPN, May 22, 2016, https://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/15667689/congressional-report-finds-nfl-improperly-intervened-brain-research-cost-taxpayers-16-million.
49 Thomas P. Oates and Meenakshi Gigi Durham, “The Mismeasure of Masculinity: The Male Body, ‘Race’ and Power in the Enumerative Discourses of the NFL Draft,” Patterns of Prejudice 38, no. 3 (2004): 309–10, doi: 10.1080/0031322042000250475; Daniel A. Grano, “Risky Dispositions: Thick Moral Description and Character-Talk in Sports Culture,” Southern Communication Journal 75, no. 3 (2010): 255–76, doi: 10.1080/10417940903336850.
50 Chris McLeod, Justin Lovich, Joshua I. Newman, and Rachel Shields, “The Training Camp: American Football and/as Spectacle of Exception,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 38, no. 3 (2014): 233–4, doi: 10.1177/0193723514520997.
51 Thomas P. Oates, “New Media and the Repackaging of NFL Fandom,” in The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Thomas P. Oates and Zack Furness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 80–1.
52 Kimberly B. George and David J. Leonard, “Football, Culture and Power: An Introduction,” in Football, Culture and Power, ed. David J. Leonard, Kimberly B. George, and Wade David (New York: Routledge, 2017), 4.
53 Rose and Novas, “Biological Citizenship” 442.
54 Inda, Racial, 75.
55 Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 3.
56 Inda, Racial, 75.
57 Jane Leavy, “The Woman Who Would Save Football,” Grantland, August 17, 2012, http://grantland.com/features/neuropathologist-dr-ann-mckee-accused-killing-football-be-sport-only-hope/.
58 Mark Kram, “Deadly Aftershocks,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 28, 2009, https://www.inquirer.com/philly/hp/sports/20090528_DEADLY_AFTERSHOCKS.html.
59 Stephanie Kuzydym, “After the Hits,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 24, 2014.
60 Leavy, “The Woman.”
61 Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru, League, 31, 270–1.
62 Rajan, Biocapital, 3–6.
63 Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue, 32.
64 Oates and Durham, “The Mismeasure,” 310.
65 Thomas P. Oates, “The Erotic Gaze in the NFL Draft,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2007): 77, doi: 10.1080/14791420601138351.
66 Gere, “A Brief,” 397–8.
67 Luuc Kooijmans, Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch, trans. Diane Webb (Boston, MA: Brill, 2011), 176–84; Rina Knoeff, “Touching Anatomy: On the Handling of Preparations in the Anatomical Cabinets of Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731),” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 49 (2015): 32–44, doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.11.002.
68 Kram, “Deadly”; Leavy, “The Woman”; Jacqueline Klimas, “Inside the Lab That Studies NFL Brains,” Popular Mechanics, August 31, 2010, https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/g633/inside-the-lab-that-studies-nfl-brains/.
69 Leavy, “The Woman.”
70 T. Kenny Fountain, Rhetoric in the Flesh: Trained Vision, Technical Expertise, and the Gross Anatomy Lab (New York: Routledge, 2014), 9, 121, 145.
71 Rick Telander, “What Football Did for Us and … . What Football Did to Us,” Chicago Sun Times, June 25, 2010.
72 Leavy, “The Woman.”
73 Fountain, Rhetoric, 19.
74 Leavy, “The Woman.”
75 Ibid.
76 Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru, League, 453.
77 Leavy, “The Woman.”
78 Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru, League, 455–6.
79 Leavy, “The Woman”
80 John Allen, “Head-On Collision,” On Wisconsin, Winter 2010, https://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/features/head-on-collision/.
81 Lillian Campbell, “‘MacGyver-Meets-Dr. Ruth’: Science Journalism and the Material Positioning of Dr. Carla Pugh,” Women's Studies in Communication 37, no. 1 (2014): 44–65, doi: 10.1080/07491409.2013.867916.
82 Erin Whiteside and Marie Hardin, “Women (Not) Watching Women: Leisure Time, Television, and Implications for Televised Coverage of Women's Sports,” Communication, Culture & Critique 4, no. 2 (2011): 122–43, doi: 10.1111/j.1753-9137.2011.01098.x.
83 Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy & Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 4–7, 353–8.
84 Thomas P. Oates, Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL(Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 2017), 163–4.
85 Leavy, “The Woman.”
86 Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy, 200; Carolyn Skinner, Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), 8; Carolyn Skinner, “‘The Purity of Truth’: Nineteenth-Century American Women Physicians Write about Delicate Topics,” Rhetoric Review 26, no. 2 (2007): 105, doi: 10.1080/07350190709336704.
87 Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy, 4–5, 357–8.
88 Oates, Football, 163–4.
89 Susan Wells, “Legible Bodies: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Rhetoric of Dissection,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 58–67.
90 Leavy, “The Woman.”
91 For more on changes in the league's masculine, violent ethos see Eric Anderson and Edward M. Kian, “Examining Media Contestation of Masculinity and Head Trauma in the National Football League,” Men and Masculinities 15, no. 2 (2012): 167–8, doi: 10.1177/1097184X11430127.
92 Nikolas Rose, “The Politics of Life Itself,” Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 6 (2001): 5–6, doi: 10.1177/02632760122052020.
93 Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue, 128–9; Catherine Waldby, “Umbilical Cord Blood: From Social Gift to Venture Capital,” BioSocieties 1, no. 1 (2006): 55–70; Carlos Novas and Nikolas Rose, “Genetic Risk and the Birth of the Somatic Individual,” Economy and Society 29, no. 4 (2000): 486–8, doi: 10.1080/03085140050174750.
94 Inda, Racial, 94, 103; also see Henry A. Giroux, “Beyond the Biopolitics of Disposability: Rethinking Neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age,” Social Identities 14, no. 5 (2008): 587–620, doi: 10.1080/13504630802343432.
95 Roberts, Fatal, 210–11.
96 “Detection and Treatment of Concussions in Student Athletes,” C-SPAN, October 19, 2011, https://www.c-span.org/video/?302174-1/detection-treatment-concussions-student-athletes.
97 Gere, “Brief,” 408–9.
98 Jeffrey A. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 6.
99 Ibid.
100 Associated Press, “Birk Donates Brain, Spinal Cord Tissue,” ESPN, September 16, 2009, http://www.espn.com/nfl/news/story?id=4479212.
101 Richard M. Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (New York: The New Press, 1997), 123–99.
102 Jeffrey A. Bennett, “Passing, Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance: Infiltrating the Ritual Space of Blood Donation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 1 (2008): 39, doi: 10.1080/00335630701790818.
103 Waldby, “Umbilical,” 56–8.
104 Rob Arthur, “The Shrinking Shelf Life of NFL Players,” The Wall Street Journal, February 29, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-shrinking-shelf-life-of-nfl-players-1456694959.
105 Eddie Pells and Larry Fenn, “AP Analysis: NFL Keeps Going Younger and Cheaper,” Associated Press, January 27, 2019, https://apnews.com/116b7142400240b8852330eedbd82d6d.
106 Peter Benson, “Big Football: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Culture and Color of Injury in America's Most Popular Sport,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 41, no. 4 (2017): 315, doi: 10.1177/0193723517707699.
107 Sean Hill II, “Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter,” Women's Studies Quarterly 45, no. 3/4 (2017): 94–8, doi: 10.1353/wsq.2017.0046.
108 Zach Furness, “Reframing Concussions, Masculinity, and NFL Mythology in League of Denial,” Popular Communication 14, no. 1 (2016): 51, doi: 10.1080/15405702.2015.1084628. The “informed soldier” parallels other sacrificial and militarized rhetorics in football. See Michael L. Butterworth, “NFL Films and the Militarization of Professional Football,” in The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, 214–8.
109 Stephanie Kuzydym, “Ann McKee: The Woman Who Fell in Love with Brains,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 27, 2014, https://www.cleveland.com/sports/2014/08/meet_ann_mckee_the_woman_who_f.html.
110 William Weinbaum, “Fred McNeill's Death Could Be Milestone in Determining CTE in Living Players,” ESPN, February 4, 2016, http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/14714852/fred-mcneill-had-cte-identified-was-alive.
111 Patrick Hruby, “The Future of Protecting Brain Damage in Football,” The Atlantic, September 21, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/09/football-brain-injury-chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy/540459/; Jenny Vrentas, “Diagnosing CTE: A Breakthrough Could be Here ‘In the Next Five Years,’” Sports Illustrated, September 27, 2017, https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/09/27/cte-diagnosis-living-patients-concussions-football-players.
112 Rick Maese, “Breakthrough May Lead to Ability to Diagnose CTE in Living Football Players,” The Washington Post, September 26, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/breakthrough-may-lead-to-ability-to-diagnose-cte-in-living-football-players/2017/09/26/a6e1e8c4-a2bb-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html.
113 Novas and Rose, “Genetic Risk,” 488.
114 See, for example: “We Asked NFL Players: What Would You Do If You Found Out You Had CTE?,” Sports Illustrated, December 13, 2017, https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/12/13/nfl-cte-test-living-patients?utm_campaign=themmqb&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social; Des Bieler, “Kirk Cousins and Other NFL Players Say They’d Want to Take CTE Tests While Active,” The Washington Post, December 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2017/12/14/kirk-cousins-and-other-nfl-players-say-theyd-want-to-take-cte-tests-while-active/.
115 J. Blake Scott, Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 9–12, 158.
116 Kelly Happe, The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity after the Human Genome Project (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 10.
117 Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, “Youth Football Participation Drops,” ESPN, November 13, 2013, http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/page/popwarner/pop-warner-youthfootball-participation-drops-nfl-concussion-crisis-seen-causal-factor; Bob Cook, “The Slow Drip of Football's Youth Participation Decline Continues Apace,” Forbes, April 19, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2019/04/19/the-slow-drip-of-footballs-youth-participation-decline-continues-apace/#6fe5f93465ce; Mark Fainaru-Wada and Michele Steele, “Debate Over Youth Tackle Football an Extension of Country's Polarized Politics,” ESPN, September 28, 2018, https://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/24773919/efforts-ban-youth-tackle-football-five-states-draw-comparisons-nanny-state-grass-roots-politics.
118 Victoria E. Johnson, “‘Together We Make Football’: The NFL's ‘Feminine’ Discourses,” Popular Communication 14, no. 1 (2016): 12–20, doi: 10.1080/15405702.2015.1084622; Benson, “Big Football,” 307–34.
119 For more on this possibility see Hruby, “The Future.”
120 Kevin Clark, “Boston University's CTE Breakthrough Could Forever Change Football,” The Ringer, September 26, 2017, https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2017/9/26/16372088/boston-university-cte-test-for-the-living-football-impact.
121 Rachel Allison, Adriene Davis, and Raymond Barranco, “A Comparison of Hometown Socioeconomics and Demographics for Black and White Elite Football Players in the US,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 53, no. 5 (2018): 615–29, doi: 10.1177/1012690216674936.
122 Kevin Grier and Tyler Cowen, “What Would the End of Football Look Like?,” Grantland, February 13, 2012, https://grantland.com/features/cte-concussion-crisis-economic-look-end-football/.
123 Semuels, “The White Flight.”
124 Amanda Morris and Michel Martin, “Poor Students More Likely to Play Football, Despite Brain Injury Concerns,” NPR, February 3, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/02/03/691081227/poor-students-more-likely-to-play-football-despite-brain-injury-concerns.
125 “Dr. Harry Edwards on the Injustice of Brain Injuries & CTE as NFL Rosters Become Predominantly Black,” Democracy Now, September 25, 2017, https://www.democracynow.org/2017/9/25/dr_harry_edwards_on_the_injustice?autostart=true.
126 “Estimated Probability of Competing in College Athletics,” NCAA, http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-probability-competing-college-athletics; “Estimated Probability of Competing in Professional Athletics,” NCAA, http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-probability-competing-professional-athletics; Morris and Martin, “Poor Students.”
127 Mychal Denzel Smith, “For Black Boys, the NFL—and Traumatic Brain Injury—Can Be Lottery Tickets,” The Nation, January 28, 2013, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/black-boys-nfl-and-traumatic-brain-injury-can-be-lottery-tickets/.
128 Inda, Racial, 43–6.