Vikings

FOOTBALL MACHINE: A Break From Football

Sam Ekstrom, Arif Hasan and Luke Inman hit the pause button on football talk and discuss the last week in Minneapolis, addressing the death of George Floyd and the local and national response.

Here is a link to donate to organizations fighting against racism and police brutality.

Aggregated below are a series of studies Arif referenced on racism from a post he published in 2017.

Qualified black students were three times less likely to be identified by teachers to be selected for gifted and talented programs. Here’s the original resume study. And here’s a followup on the famous resume experiment, this time contextualized in the framework of a black Harvard graduate. Here’s one on whether having a black face on a resume impacts callback rates.  

Environmental racism is a concept that refers to the idea that race factors into environmental decisions, like where to place polluting factories, which toxic waste spells to clean up and quality of drinking water. These result in an increased prevalence of asthma, increased severity of asthma symptoms, low birth weights, and high blood pressure.

This site has collected study after study of every single type of medical interaction and how they’re impacted by race. They went over pain management, organ donation decisions, diagnosis accuracy, cardiology, prescription drug decisions, oncology, mental illness and more. Even the amount of time one spends at a doctor’s visit. Where hospitals are placed is impacted by race, and within the same health care facilities, black patients tend to receive worse care.

In education, schools are less likely to be well-funded, have access to educational resources, have better class size ratios, have higher quality and up-to-date textbooks and have qualified teachers (or teacher who have time to prepare lessons) if they serve a primarily black population than otherwise.

Studies on police brutality — this is the one I mentioned from 1974, this is the ProPublica report indicating young black males are 21 times more likely to experience a police shooting than white teenage men and this one that only looks at cases where there was a police interaction indicates a black person is 3.49 times likely to be shot than a white person when controlling for all factors. And police interaction occurs much more often to black people than white people. When assessing threats, officers are much more likely to mistake objects (like a cell phone) held by black people as guns than similar objects held by white people. Off-duty officers who are shot are nine times more likely to be black or latino than white.

Even outside the context of shootings, officers are much more likely to use force in general in interactions with black suspects than white suspects. And once in custody, black people die at four times the rate as white people.

(Music via HookSounds.com.)

Sam Ekstrom (@SamEkstrom) is a Zone Coverage staff writer covering the Minnesota Vikings and Golden Gophers basketball.

Arif Hasan (@ArifHasanNFL) covers the Minnesota Vikings for The Athletic.

Luke Inman (@Luke_SpinmanNFL) Luke Inman is Zone Coverage’s resident NFL Draft guru and video content creator.

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