Remember the Titans

Perhaps more than any other Hollywood movie, Remember the Titans (2000) reveals the template for the planned replacement of the American majority. Ostensibly a heart-warming tale about a group of high school football players working to overcome racism in turbulent times, the barely buried subtext is that whites should gladly—altruistically—hand over everything that they value to blacks. The football team represents American society in microcosm: black, white, and tense. Subtlety is not this film’s forte.

The film opens in the present with a mixed group of well-dressed blacks and whites arriving at a cemetery. A voiceover tells us that in 1971 their school in Alexandria, Virginia had been forced by the school board to integrate.  The action then fades back to that time. As Hollywood routinely does, it depicts violence coming only from whites, with the narrator telling us that a white store owner has killed a black youth, precipitating violence in town. Bill Yoast, the white coach of the all-white football team, establishes his credentials as a moral person when he prevents his boys, including his star quarterback who hates these “black animals,” from heading into town to protect the white store owner.

Into this tense situation comes a new black coach, Herman Boone (played by Denzel Washington), who moves his family into an all-white neighborhood. At the recently integrated school, the men find out that Boone will replace Yoast as head coach, a proposition that the white coaches find unpalatable. The white players, too, object, threatening to boycott the black coach. Yoast, however, convinces them that the right thing to do is play ball.

Play they do, beginning with a bus trip to summer camp. To no one’s surprise, the bus scene is used to highlight segregation. Coach Boone is eager to establish his dominance and does so when Gary, the white quarterback, tries to act as master of the coach. Boone neatly turns this around by humiliating Gary (and all the white parents watching), badgering the boy with taunts of “Who’s your daddy?” Meekly, Gary gives in and rides the integrated bus.

Upon arrival at the camp, Boone demands that white and black players share rooms. Clashes erupt over tastes in music as well as responses to a poster of black athletes giving the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. An obese white lineman confesses to all in the cafeteria that he is too stupid to go to college. To remedy this, a brilliant black player volunteers to tutor the grateful white, who acknowledges that he is nothing but “white trash.”

Injecting historical seriousness into the film, Boone runs his charges through the dense woods, coming upon a fog-shrouded battlefield cemetery. He then speaks of the background of the Civil War and its attempt to erase the wrongs of slavery. Let us not, he intones, forget those goals and sacrifices, nor let those past hatreds persist.

The second white character to become a moral center for this film is Gary, the quarterback. Unlike Coach Yoast, Gary harbors racist feelings toward blacks. He will be one of three examples of whites who come to terms with the new conditions in America, finding it unthinkable at first but slowly coming to see both its inevitability and rightness. After sharing a room with a black teammate, Gary returns to town more open-minded. His girlfriend, however, remains a segregationist and refuses to shake hands with a black player. She, too, will change, though, becoming another white character on screen to lead reluctant whites in the theater audience to make the same transition.

At the Titans’ first game, one in which the whites in the stands segregate themselves, the mixed Titans defeat an all-white team. Celebrating after the game, Gary’s white friends expect him to join them for some fun, but Gary sticks with his black and white teammates. Hungry, they look for a restaurant. A newly arrived teammate from California promises to treat them at a local restaurant, but the black players balk. Finally, they all enter, whereupon the simian-looking and unshaven white owner refuses to seat them at any of the open tables. After all, this is the segregated South.

Director Boaz Yakin

Meanwhile, back in school, the issue of interracial dating is hinted at but is quickly turned into an opportunity to castigate whites for their racism. When a black player moves in close to a group of white girls, teasing them about who’s good looking, white students begin a scuffle. Gary, growing ever more certain of the evils of racism—including white solidarity—steps in to threaten his former friends.

Yoast’s young daughter is the third major character to revise her feelings toward blacks. At first she sees Coach Boone as a black interloper who is taking her daddy’s job. Later, she reluctantly allows that Boone isn’t such a bad coach. Later still, after befriending Boone’s daughter, she is at the Boone home when racists throw a brick through the front window. Now she too takes sides, going so far as to tell her father that she hates living among “rednecks.”

The racial conflict grows in intensity. For instance, a white player deliberately misses a block during a game, resulting in an injury to a black player. Again taking the movie-constructed moral position, Gary ignores white solidarity and has the white player thrown off the team. Next, in the regional championship, the opposing coach and referees are openly racist, making ridiculous penalty calls, but still the Titans prevail. In the line-up after the game to shake hands, though, the other team’s white coach refuses to shake hands with Boone.

By this point in the film, the proper position for the audience to espouse has been firmly established. From here on out, characters either get with the program or get relegated to the realm of the hopelessly racist. Gary’s girlfriend is one of the first to repent, coming down to the field during a game to shake hands with a black player.

Her boyfriend, Gary, however, takes the symbolism to a new level: that of Christ-like martyr for the sake of his black teammates. Driving his ’69 Chevy Camaro through town after another Titans victory, his car is broadsided by an old pickup truck, and he is permanently paralyzed from the waist down. In the hospital, Gary watches on TV as his team fights its way to victory in the Virginia State Championship. Director Boaz Yakin sets up a shot where white light from above shines over the prostrate Gary, who then lifts his arms into a Christ-like pose. He has given everything so that his black teammates may play.

In the film’s climax, the Titans are losing. At halftime, Coach Yoast  makes a rousing speech, telling the team that they have taught him that people really are to be judged by their character not race. Fired up, the boys return to the field to do battle. Another white player gives up his starting position to a black teammate voluntarily and without prodding. The decision turns out to be the right one, for the black player recovers a fumble, then later sprints 75 yards downfield for the winning touchdown, while the new white quarterback blocks for him. No opportunity is missed to show that the world is a better place when blacks replace whites. The lesson for American society in general is clear.