I know what you're thinking, "Here we go again with another totally unhinged claim of racism." This one is different though in that it appeared in Scientific American, making it way more sciency than the others.

This ordinary violence has always riddled the sport and it affects all players. But Black players are disproportionately affected.

You can tell that you're reading an article in Scientific American because of the careful attention author Tracie Canada pays to marshaling relevant data and statistics in order to support her hypothesis.

While I am not aware of research that compares the rate of injury between Black and white football players, heatstrokes, ACL and labrum tears, ankle sprains, bone breaks, and concussions are just a few of the consequences of how these bodies are used.

Translation: "While I may not have any data that proves my point, shut up you're racist."

Non-white players account for 70 percent of the NFL; nearly half of all Division I college football players are Black.

To be precise, because looking up facts is hard, 57.5% of NFL players are black.

Further, through a process called racial stacking, coaches racially segregate athletes by playing position. These demographic discrepancies place Black athletes at a higher risk during play.

Who needs data when you have words.

Regardless, Canada appears to be making the argument that the fact that a disproportionate percentage of players in the NFL are black is evidence of racism.

Hamlin's injury demonstrates that ordinary violence has potentially deadly consequences, and highlights how Black men's athletic labor sustains this brutal system.

On these playing fields, ones that sociologist Billy Hawkins would argue are never theoretically far from plantation fields, financial stakeholders value Black bodies for their productive potential and physical prowess.

That's interesting, because I could have sworn that it's racist when you have too few black people in a sport.

The report released Tuesday found that 83.6% of the NHL's workforce is white and that men make up nearly 62% of the total, based on the 4,200 people who participated in a voluntary and anonymous survey (about 67% of all employees).

That nearly mirrors the situation on the ice, where more than 90% of players and nearly all coaches and officials are white.

Pick a lane lady.

And we're not talking golf here, we're talking hockey, which is at least as physically brutal as football.

It's interesting that Canada cares so very much about black people that she wants them to... what? Give up one of the rarest and most elite jobs on the planet, one for which millions of young men of every color would do almost anything, and do, including risking serious bodily harm?

Canada dismisses the notion that high pay makes up for the bodily damage inherent in the sport by noting that only the pros make the big bucks totally ignoring just how big those bucks are and the fact that the potential of such a paycheck is why athletes are willing to endure the punishment. And in any case, with the advent of image and likeness revenue now available to college athletes it probably won't be long before you'll be seeing talented elementary-school prospects doing local used car commercials.

("I may not be able to see over the steering wheel, but I sure can see a good deal!")

Let's apply some hard-science rigor to the matter and do the math that Canada can't be bothered with, preferring instead to hew closer to her soft-as-a-pillow science of cultural anthropology, a field that were it to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow the only people who would notice would be cultural anthropologists.

The average pay in the NFL is close to a million dollars a year, but that is skewed by the superstars. Let's take a "rising rookie" starting pay of $435,000 to be conservative.

Now, consider the average career lasting 3.3 years. Again, being conservative.

Now multiply the two to get total career earnings of $1,435,500. Divide that by a more typical 30-year career and you get an average salary of $47,850, which is still above the median U.S. salary of $44,225.

(I use median to again eliminate super-high earners that skew results.)

Account for higher taxes during the football player's career, depending on his accountant, and maybe you can call that even or close to it.

Plus, the player still has a spare 26.7 years of earnings potential left!

Maybe these players aren't the helpless brutes being easily manipulated by the system that Canada makes them out to be. (And really, what's that all about?)

No, these are full-grown men making adult decisions about what they want to do with their lives.

I should note that the editors of Scientific American are careful to add this disclaimer to the bottom of the piece:

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Also the editors:

The anti-Blackness of the system is inescapable." Important analysis of football from @tracie_canada on @sciam

"Important analysis."

In other words:

"These are not necessarily our opinions.

But yeah, these are our opinions."

Helmuth is no low-level editor, she's the Editor-in-Chief, and has been a science writer for decades.

Watch her brilliance unfold in respectful silence as your tongue is quieted by her blinding intellect.

annnnnd the replies to any tweet about systemic racism prove the existence of systemic racism

What a pwn!

And you can tell she's an editor who's down with the kids what with the complete lack of punctuation and capitalization (which does make that editing job a lot easier.)

I do wonder if she thinks this guy is racist. Maybe she should slide into his DMs and ask.

Turns out that men don't like to be treated like helpless children after all.

Incidentally, that comment reflected the tenor of the overall comments pretty well.

Meaning disagreeing with Laura Helmuth about being a racist, is, well, racist!