Weathering Anti-Blackness

On June 2, 2021, the National Football League announced it would discontinue the use of race-norming in legal settlements for concussion-related injuries. The anti-Black practice of scientific racism at the foundation of race-norming disproportionately affected retired Black players’ ability to access compensation for medical issues they developed from sustained football play. On the same day, Major League Baseball celebrated its inaugural Lou Gehrig Day to honor the Yankees baseball player’s life and legacy, as he succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) on this day decades before. This terminal neurodegenerative disease has been coded a “white disease” with Gehrig as its moniker, thereby rendering Black people invisible in ALS care and scientific spaces. Through events that occurred in these professional leagues on the same June day, we ethnographically theorize “weathering in sport” to discuss how Black athletes are both harmed and omitted from larger conversations about traumatic sport injuries and illnesses. We use the frames of weathering and the weather of anti-Blackness to emphasize the disproportionate impact of injury on Black athletic bodies from an anthropological perspective.