Darkness In Friday Night Lights

In Friday Night Lights black and white symbolizes the racial divisions in the town. The white east side, African American south side, and Latino west side. The team colors of Permian Panther High School are white and black. Bissinger uses the black and white as symbolism and says football is the only thing in the town where the decisions are white and black. The politics, economy, and social issues are muddy and gray.

A dominate view in the film is discrimination against black people in the community and in sports. There has always been discrimination in sports, as state in an article, “Jackie Robinson led the entire nation in rushing yards per attempt, averaging a staggering 12 yards per carry. At the close of his UCLA career in 1941, Robinson participated in the annual All-Star Game, which pitted the nation’s best college players against the NFL’s strongest team.” Jackie Robinson the first African American to play in Major League Baseball was also a strong a player of football. He played in the All-Star Game and went against profession team and still was able to hold his own, but the NFL also had its racial law and didn’t allow him to player and his name was never called in the draft list.

Barry Beckham’s novel, Runner Mack, was published in 1972 and became the first baseball novel written by an African American. The novel follows the life of Henry Adams, a young African American male who moves to a northern city in an attempt to initiate his professional baseball career and start a home with his new wife, Beatrice. Beckham invokes Langston Hughes’s poem Harlem in which Hughes asks “What happens to a dream deferred?” to tell a common, yet underrepresented story of the black experience in America. Henry’s undying belief in the American Dream exemplifies the illusion that every person has the chance to achieve their dreams and obtain social mobility by pulling themselves up from their bootstraps.

I wanted to first say that these are strictly my own opinions and I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback. First, there is a perception in sports that I heard numerous of times that African Americans do not make the best coaches. I would definitely argue that notion. I believe that African Americans in most cases do not receive the same treatment as any white coach in college and major sports. I do believe there needs to be a Rooney Rule, especially in collegiate sports.

How often in the 60’s would we you have the minority of white people on a basketball team? That's what we had happed during the movie Glory Road. We followed a coach who made a team who he thought would win with. We saw them getting crap for the color of the boys on his team. As you watch you see many possible themes but the one that i thought stuck out was courage.

About a year and a half ago, my brother and I were at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp during the summer. I was talking with one of my buddies in the camp about the religion I practice, when suddenly a camp counselor tapped me on my shoulder. I turned around and he had the most utterly confused look on his face I’d ever seen. He actually asked me without a doubt in his mind, “Wait? If you’re Jewish then where's your horns?”

Have you ever felt like you don't belong even though it's where you are supposed to be? In the film Remember the Titans the director Boaz Yakin’s shows how the football team felt that same way. Yakins showed how they got over it throughout coming together to build a community, through unity, acceptance, and through self-fulfillment. When the titans built their sense of community all the team players showed a different side to the other teammates, as the team was becoming more accepted and the team started to feel self-fulfilled. With the Titans working on coming together during training camp a sense of community is already being established as the team must find a way to work together.

In The Truth About the 1980’s Economy, Michael Schaller explains that “ put simply, the rich got richer and everyone else tread water.” In other words, Schaller suggests that the 1980’s age of Reaganomics wasn’t as renowned as some modern conservatives may suggest, and that under Reagan’s presidency majority of America did not financially benefit. Although Reagan was skilled in having corporate America succeed, the average American citizen did not gain the same prosperity. In Friday Night Lights, the small town of Odessa is a truly American town based in Texas that was widely traditional in values, and conservative in politics. Through Schaller’s perspective, the town is quite paradoxical because although they support and vote for conservative

All sports fans may think of their favorite athlete as a hero, a god, a role model, or someone they wish to be. As an athlete there is always the fear of failure or missing the one shot that could have achieved their life goal. As athletes they are always expected to live, breathe, eat, and die for their sport, which in the end causes them distress. In the novel Friday Night Lights, the small town of Odessa, Texas they put that same unneeded pressure on their athletes. To them it is more about winning then actually enjoying the sport, putting an immense pressure on their team to succeed.

Throughout Paul Bogard's argument, he claims that natural darkness is quite valuable to our own lives and offers a wondrous amount of beauty before us. He starts to build his argument by referencing to a time of his youth of how he viewed the darkness as a child and how astonishing it was to experience. However, he suggests that with today's modern technology with artificial lighting in various towns & cities has caused a great drawback to the amount of natural darkness being preserved. He uses his ability to make the audience seem to relate to today's culture by saying to the audience, "All life evolved to the steady rhythm of bright days and dark nights. Today, though, when we feel the closeness of nightfall, we reach quickly for a light