Friday Night Lights

While admittedly not the main emphasis of the novel, racism shows its ugly face in the lives of the citizens of the small West Texan town of Odessa in H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream. Going into Odessa with the intention of writing solely about the culture of high school football present there, he ultimately ends up with a much wider scope:

When I first arrived in Odessa, I anticipated a book very much like tradition of the film Hoosiers… But along the way some other things happened - the most ugly racism I have ever encountered, utterly misplaced educational priorities, a town that wasn’t bad or evil but had lost any ability to judge itself. It would have been a journalistic disgrace to ignore these elements. (Bissinger, 363)

Pressure of all different types and its effects on the youth of the city take a more apparent role in the different people they see as role models and influences in their lives. Their reactions and attitudes represent the future as well as the next generation of Odessa. The general behavior and approach of the current population of the town bear great consequences on its young people, which are well embodied and well documented by Bissinger through his examples of racism and perceived justifications thereof in the facets of life Odessa holds dearest.

Odessa, Texas is a textbook example of the residual racial discrimination still lingering in the rural (and oftentimes southern) United States. Historically, as Bissinger elaborates upon in Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, Odessa has been an overwhelmingly “white” town, settled for the oils that spews from its ground like decadent fountains of wealth for the whites that collect and ship it. It is the lif...

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...y that has lost the ability to move on and re-invent itself long ago and whose priorities have been confounded for just as long.

In Texas, and in Odessa more specifically, football is a white man’s institution and is solely for their enjoyment. Although players of other races gain the right to play when the schools are combined, they too are working toward this goal whether they know it or not. The schools may never admit it, but the reason they were so adamant about receiving more black students is because they would have more running backs available for use. Laurence Hurd, the minister who pushed for the desegregation of Odessa’s schools, was correct in his comparison of football to slavery, although perhaps not to that degree. Black students, and African-Americans in general, are only acceptable when they serve a specific purpose and benefit to the white man.