White And Black Team In Remember The Titans
Reducing prejudice essentially entails changing the values and beliefs by which people live. For many reasons, this is difficult. The first is that the ideals and expectations of individuals are also a long-standing pillar of their psychological stability. Another is that prejudice also suits the particular psychological roles of individuals, enabling them to shift their aggressive impulses or maintain their fragile self-esteem (Greenberg et al., 2018). A third challenge occurs because prejudiced beliefs and biases represent schemas once formed. They tend to distort beliefs, attributions, and experiences in self-perpetuating forms, just as most schemes. Finally, often individuals weren't even conscious of their biases and their impact. All these aspects make it almost impossible to fight prejudice (Greenberg et al., 2018).
It's not easy to capture the challenges of racial integration in a movie. Many films explore issues of racial discrimination, but the 2000 film Remember the Titans offers the best dramatic illustration of how Allport's formula for effective intergroup interaction will reduce prejudice. This film is centered on the true story of segregated high schools that had been pressured to integrate in 1971 in Alexandria, Virginia, as result of a prolonged attempt to desegregate the public schools in Virginia. Merging the student population also implied that the football team has to become merged. The film describes the rising struggles of this newly diverse team and its attempt to bring together a winning season.
The film focuses on the head coach of the Titans, Herman Boone, played by Denzel Washington, who is facing an enormous challenge in preparing a mixed team of White and Black athletes who have formerly attended different high schools played on opposing teams, and yet carry profoundly rooted racial biases. In the immediate outcome of the civil rights revolution, the movie portrays the struggle on the football field as a mirror image of the dispute in American society. The film successfully shows how Coach Boone got his team together in 1971 to win the championship game.
The involvement of institutional support is among the components of successful intergroup interaction. This support is shown in the film when the school administration agrees to offer the Black high school coach instead of a White high school coach the head coaching job. This decision gives the athletes and their families a strong indication that the school administration has good plans to integrate the school, the sport teams, and the employees. While disagreements often erupt between the coaches, they normally work effectively for efficient integration.
The establishment of equal status is the second aspect of successful interaction. Coach Boone renders his tough coaching approach absolutely clear to the parents of the players, to the coaching staff's, and his players. Perhaps most notably, all black and white players are quite clearly punished fairly. As a result, the players soon discover that their skin colour won't have anything to do with winning a starting position on the team. Anyone who decides to play for the team is going to have to practice really hard.
As such, the athletes are unable to get over their distrust of each other. Coach Boone gets involved, seeing as his players appears to resort to self-segregation by race. As the team head off in two buses to a training camp, the coach separated the team not only by race but by offensive or defensive positions. For the intense training period, he groups white and black athletes to a dorm together to help facilitate communication. The general theme is that athletes should to operate collectively to accomplish the same superordinate goal of winning tournaments, despite of race.
This approach of forcing athletes to share a room together does not succeed at first. One of the white players reacts to his black roommate’s iconic poster of the track and field champions Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the raised-fist black power gesture d at the Olympic Games 1968 victory celebration. Not unexpectedly, tensions rise, and a fight broke out. Sharing a room often does not equate into social interaction at meal times. Recognizing that a crucial element, personal and assorted communication still is lacking, Coach Boone requires each athlete to interview his roommate to further knock down barriers of uncertainty and hostility. As Allport might have expected, after this final aspect of cooperation is formed, the players eventually start to operate as a cohesive unit. Remember the Titans display such critical elements at work.
