Racial Discrimination In Bissinger's A Lesson Before Dying

For each character in this story, we see problems that they face in their everyday life that they use football to either cope with or cover up. Some of those characters are Boobie, Coach Gains, Don, and Mike. Boobie comes from a rough background where he struggled to survive. Because of this, Boobie struggles greatly with basic things like reading and writing. He is functionally illiterate. He was pushed through school without any demands. He basically had a tutor who gave him the answer to all the questions. There was no attempt to educate him at all (Bissinger, Buzz). Boobie also was never able to play the way he could before. After trying to return later on in the season and realizing that he could not cut and run like he use to, he had
Racism was alive and well during 1988 in Texas and is expressed through many different ways in the story stretching from the jerseys they wear, all the way to where they grow up. In this story, the team wears the colors of white and black, two of the most opposite colors, representing the diversity that is between the white and non-white people of Odessa. They struggled bitterly with racial discrimination, so much so that in 1982 it was placed under a federal court order to effectuate the desegregation both promised and denied nearly thirty years earlier. Although these troubling issues at the intersection of race, law, and sport dominated the 1988 Permian football team's season and inspired a Pulitzer Prize winning author's investigative chronicle, Friday Night Lights, to tell the tale of that team radically de-radicalizes the story (Duru, Jeremy). Of the three high schools in Odessa, one was 90 percent minority based and the other two were 90 plus percent white based. Black players are accepted on “white” teams like Permian because, after desegregation, schools without the talent of black athletes simply could no longer compete. As long as players like Boobie miles perform as they are expected to, they reap the benefits of being a football star. If something should affect their performance like an injury, they become expendable (Duru, Jeremy). Senior Brian Chaves, only Hispanic player and stellar student
For many of these people, football was the peak of their life and now they just live in a decrepit city where they have nothing left but memories. I cannot say that I would not have done the same thing. Finding something to distract us from our problems has been a coping method for us since day one, and is still done today. The way of covering up problems may be different today, for example people could have a shopping addiction, or a drug addiction that they use to help them deal with the problems in their life. Football was life for these people and, ironically, was the very thing that took their lives from