I recently got drawn into the movie, “Remember the Titans,” again while flipping through the channels the other night.  This is definitely one of those films that is hard to keep surfing past if you’ve ever seen it.  The 2000 Walt Disney film is based upon a true story and highlights efforts to integrate black and white students at a North Carolina high school in 1971 centered around the schools celebrated football program.

If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend it as perhaps it is not only one of the greatest sports movies ever made, it is also more importantly filled with timeless lessons on overcoming racism and blind, irrational hatred.  In fact, it’d probably be a great film to re-release in theaters today given our current social climate just to remind people how far we’ve come, not to give up because we’ve had a few set backs, and to encourage people to once again renew our efforts to put racism in the rear view mirror.

While physical appearance and cultural differences may divide us into regional and ethnically diverse groups, we are all essentially equal in our genetic makeup as human beings and in the eyes of our creator God.  This whole idea of races making us different and somehow superior or inferior to one another is in itself ridiculous and only continues to be perpetuated because of the constant emphasis placed upon it by certain politics and ideologies.

What I mean is, if you give it some rational thought, anyone of our bloodlines can be integrated so that our offspring will take on the characteristics of another “race,” literally within one generation.  If one of my sons or daughters were to marry into the Asian “race,” then their offspring would be a mixture between the two, from a biological perspective, nothing more -nothing  less, another human being.  It is this constant drubbing to divide us by certain political and ideological players that keeps us at odds with one another.

What is so special about this film, Remember the Titans” is that it shows us that the way forward is to just take the time to get to know others beyond what you see, to listen to others and to honestly reflect on our own biases with a level of personal honesty and openness to the truth.

In one of the great scenes of the film that exhibits this is an exchange between Gary and Julius, two stars of the team until this moment have been in opposition to one another.  I’ll leave you with this:

Let us take the lessons of this exchange and find a way forward. We are, after all sharing the same planet.