race and sports

In the year 2014 racism is alive and well. While it is true, that we have made progress towards getting along. We still have a ways to go. Sports teams can pave the way to a new beginning. Sports teams like the military have people of different races coming together to fight for a common goal. Teammates at any level usually want to win, and will over look their teammates race for the sake of the team. This opens the door for true understanding. There are many examples of this in the movies we have watched. In the movie “Remember the Titans.” Both white and black players had to play together due to integration in schools. At the start of the movie the coaches wouldn’t get along with each other same with the football players.  The new head coach “Boone” had everyone get off their buses and he split them into offense and defense. This made the buses not segregated and whoever they sat with was their roommate at camp. Coach had all the players get to know their families, what they like, where they were from, what they eat etc... After the big step of getting to know each other they started to work for the same goal and became a team. Sports may, or may not eliminate racism.  After a football game Gerry asked coach if he can kick ray off the team because he was purposely not blocking for Rev. Sports did not eliminate racism for Ray. If his hate was so strong that he wouldn’t even work with the team then he shouldn’t be playing.  Sports did however change Gerry’s beliefs about racism. Even with the movie “42” one of the men on Jackie’s team heard another man by the dugout yelling slurs at Robinson and he got sick of it. He went out of the dugout and defended Jackie Robinson. The way he thought about it changed after the coach showed him the letters that were sent to Jackie. He even took a big step and went up to Jackie in a game and was saying that he had family in the stands and they need to know who he was. In the movie “Glory Road” There was not many black players in basket-ball. They were getting racial slurs all the time and bad stuff happened at a hotel and restaurant. All the players came together and got past the racism between them and they worked together and they won the championship game. All of these movies and articles somehow show their moral high ground. All of these coaches also took the moral high ground. They could have split the team into whites only offense or blacks only defense. But they didn’t because it was a team and they all worked together to achieve their goal.