Stereotypes In Sports

For hundreds of years, our society has been blanketed with racism, discrimination, and prejudice, but how does one stop it? As bad as it is to say, how does one imagine a world without it. That is how prevalent it is in current day society. In the same way, there has long existed this exact same problem throughout the world of sports. It was not until the early sixties when most of the United States professional sports leagues began allowing African-Americans to compete. However, once these athletes broke the color barrier, they were able to use this platform to spark social change on the issue of race relations throughout the country. Unfortunately, some like Colin Kaepernick, are paying the price of being unemployed for this outward expression

A majority of these stereotypes are negative, but most of them eventually change over time. The most prominent stereotype is African-Americans being seen as less fit to accomplish the same things as the Caucasian kids. In portraying this message through a movie that revolves around a football team, this ‘less fit’ status is mostly witnessed where the African-American kids are not as good of football players as the Caucasian kids. Aside from this, there is also an overwhelming amount of blatant racial prejudice from other teammates, students, and community members towards the African-American players. A majority of these community members that participate in this blatant racial prejudice are also stereotyped by the creators of the movie. They fit the stereotype of what one would imagine when thinking of a white southern in the slang they use and their attitude towards African-Americans, which is greatly negative. The two stereotypes mentioned above work together to create a lot of the controversy and animosity that is seen in the film. For a majority of the film, these stereotypes remain constant. However, near the end, as the team and the town begin to unite together to fight this prejudice, these stereotypes start to change. This change was not easy and was only accomplished, because of the relentless effort of the African-American players fighting for that change,

Authoritarianism is defined in the textbook as, “A set of attitudes—authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism—that lead people to be prejudiced against groups that authority figures condemn and that are perceived to violate traditional values” (Kite and Whitley, 2016). The definition mentions that this personality style typically leads people to act prejudiced towards minority groups. Interestingly, this movie depicts the authoritarianistic personality through Coach Herman Boone, who would be considered a part of the minority group. Due to the situation Boone is in, one would think that he does not fit the authoritarian personality. However, he constantly refers to himself as the team’s dictator. This self-pronouncement and other authoritarianistic behaviors throughout the film lead me to conclude that he fits this personality type. This is an interesting dynamic and would lead one to think, as an authoritarian, Coach Boone would act prejudiced towards his Caucasian players, but that is not the case, which supports the interesting dynamic mentioned above. Besides this, there is also other characters in the movie where their characteristics separate them from other group members. Throughout the film, there is a collective stereotype that African-Americans are unfit, but Defensive