How Does Coach Boone Use Racial Tension In Remember The Titans

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The film Remember the Titans dramatizes the racial tension that still existed in the United States post Civil Right movement; it tells the story of Coach Boone (Denzel Washington) who is hired to coach a football team in a school that was forced to integrate. The fact that Coach Boone had the opportunity to fix some of the problems allows the movie to make the argument that one single person can make a difference even if the problem is racial tensions. Racial tensions were arising every day between team members because their school, T.C. Williams, became integrated. This brought a lot of questions to mind: Are all men created equal? Is it possible for a single person to make an impact on multiple people’s lives? Possibility is an understatement …show more content…

These things embody the argument that even just one person can make a difference. His uncanny ability to connect with players on so many different fields gives him the ability to affect these athletes lives for the better. Coach Boone employs his influence as a black head football coach in the south, budding racial tensions in community and his team, and the unified goal to be successful, in order to bring his racially divided football team together with a physically palpable …show more content…

The midnight setting at the cemetery for the Battle of Gettysburg gave Boone’s words an extraordinary power; he gave them a patriotic and an innate sense of responsibility to make sure that those soldiers that died died in order to unite people and bring them together. By informing the team of the historical background and the importance of the events that took place there he has power behind his words, and his slow and deliberate tone allots them adequate time for total comprehension. But like all teachers do, he started with a question giving them an opportunity to become engaged as well as making it real for them. Without even saying anything, team unity is promoted by having them run together, as well as listen to the speech together. During his speech he emphasizes that exact point “I don’t care if you like each other or not. But you will respect each other. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe we’ll learn to play this game like men”. He was in the position to say these things to them at this point because of the authority he had developed up to this point, if he had tried to do this in the beginning it would not have gone how it did at this point. In his speech he borrowed credibility from Gettysburg, towards the end of the speech he told the boys to “take a lesson

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