Remember The Titans

Remember The Titans

In the movie "Remember the Titans" social differences in status and play a major role in how the characters are portrayed, and how the story develops. It is based on a true story, though very much made for Hollywood, about what happened when the influences of race were dividing a town, and all of the people within it. In the "white dominated" suburbia area of the south, and the creation of T.C. Williams High School, a school that supported segregation, parents were the ringleaders of influence. It was the young people that started to make changes in the views of the community. The key topics in this film are segregation and discrimination, and the social problems that have arisen because of them.

Synopsis:

Suburban Virginia schools have been segregated for generations, in sight of the Washington Monument over the river in the nation's capital. One Black and one White high school are closed and the students sent to T.C. Williams High School under federal mandate to integrate. The year is seen through the eyes of the football team where the man hired to coach the Black school is made head coach over the highly successful white coach. Based on the actual events of 1971, the team becomes the unifying symbol for the community as the boys and the adults learn to depend on and trust each other.

Segregation, what it is and how it applies to the film and today's society. Segregation is defined as being the policy or practice of separation between people of different races, classes, or ethnic groups, especially as a form of discrimination. Be it implemented by either an institutional or private endeavor. In the film segregation plays the front role, our protagonist being a man of color himself, is put right in the middle of the current conflict within the community. He has replaced the previous white high school football coach that everyone in the community has a personal relationship with. This creates an immediate negative reaction towards him. Spawned both by anger due to his appointment over a figure head in the community, and also the color of his skin. The white people of the town are clearly portrayed as being racist, and are not willing to change their viewpoints anytime soon, however it is the same within the black communities. Both groups are strong headed in their views and opinions. There are only specific and rare individuals within both groups that are willing to at least listen to the "other" side. The white community felt as though the black population would take over their schools and ruin there pristine all American small dream town, where as the black population felt that they would never fit in and that they needed to stay to themselves and watch out for there own exclusively. The males in the society had the ability to meld through the use of sports, and the girls were left to co-mingle within the confines of the school itself. It was not clearly portrayed in the film, but it should be noted that females within the black community during that time had an extremely difficult time at the schools, constant persecution based on color alone.

If the black female students have been of the male gender, then the color of skin would not have mattered so much, their mothers saying things like: that a black boy could get along, but that a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment? But she was not a boy; she was a girl, and color did matter, mattered so much that she would rather have missed receiving her high school diploma than have to sit as she now sat, the only odd and conspicuous figure on the auditorium platform of the Boise high schoolÐ'... Get a diploma? - What did it mean to go to college? - Perhaps. A job? - Perhaps again. She was going to have a high school diploma, but it would mean nothing to her whatsoever.

-Thurman (1929)

The movie portrays that both sides of the community both black and white, view themselves as two large family groups that oppose each other.

Family influence is another concept that can help associate the situation present in the film. There are multiple interpretations of the family here, families in the film both divide and bring together the community.