Remember The Titans Sociological Theory

After discussing both the social cognitive theory and the cultivation theory in class, we were asked to choose a film that represented either the portrayal of social groups or violence in the media. For this assignment, I will be discussing one of my all time favorite movies, Remember the Titans, and the representation of social groups in this film with the social cognitive learning theory. The film takes place during the era of segregation and racial discrimination in our country, specifically in Virginia. The town is under extreme chaos after a young black man is killed by a white store owner. The whites and blacks are recently immigrated at T. C. Williams High School, and the film focuses on the school’s football team. In general, the
First, “In order for a person to model a behavior they must be exposed to a media example and pay attention to it”. Secondly, “The person must be capable of symbolically encoding and remembering the observed events, including both constructing the representation and cognitively rehearsing it when the media example is no longer present”. Thirdly, “The person must be able to translate the symbolic conceptions into appropriate action”. Also, as discussed in our class notes, this theory highly emphasizes the imitation of
Based on our lecture notes, “Desensitization explains that exposure to media violence reduces our mental responsiveness to real depictions of violence”. When the white people during this time became so used to seeing the horrible treatment of blacks, they began to completely lose their ability to empathize with the people of the opposite race, and initially, the african americans were treated more like animals than people. This can be seen in the film when Gary refers to his fellow african americans as “them," when talking to another white player. Although they have been forced to put their differences aside for the sake of the team, and Gary may not have meant for that comment to come out the way it did, it is very offensive to the african american players, specifically, Julius. Because Gary was so used to looking at african americans as though they were “different," and being in an environment where white was the only race accepted, he probably didn’t even realize something as simple as using “them” to talk about them would be that offensive or hurtful, thus being