I’m reading the H.G. Bissinger book (I loved the movie and the TV series).
On page 58, it discusses Crane, Texas, where a “five-foot-high wall of rock and concrete…ran along a street and had been built so the whites who lived on the edge of Niggertown would not have to see it… He and the handful of other blacks who lived in this town of thirty-eight hundred people could do whatever they wanted inside that wall; no one really cared. But whenever they ventured outside it, it was without welcome.”
Boobie, the star black running back, was classified as learning disabled and took classes three years behind his peers. Blacks on average achieve academically at a rate three years behind whites as the average black IQ in America is 85 while the average white IQ is 100.
Many teachers did little more than babysit the kid. On the football field, he was coddled. Boobie didn’t like to work. He didn’t care about the team. He only cared about himself. “He’s got a man’s body, but you’re dealing with the mentality of a 12-year old child,” says a coach, echoing the way many non-blacks think of blacks.
Many of the black athletes in the book do not tend to be mentally tough. When Boobie is criticized, he “laid down like a mule.”
Many whites in the town said that if Boobie couldn’t carry a football, he might as well get a broom and prepare for his future career cleaning stockrooms. What was Boobie without football? “A big ol’ dumb nigger.”
When the public schools in West Texas are forcefully integrated in the 1980s, they go to hell. The black and brown kids beat up the white kids. Academic decline. The teachers get disillusioned about teaching kids who either don’t want to learn or don’t have the cognitive power to learn.
From page 93:
Dwaine pegged the start of his son’s problems to 1982, when the junior high school he went to got desegregated as a result of the fight that had taken place in the courts. “He would not even go to the bathroom in junior high. He wouldn’t even go to the bathroom, because he was afraid of the niggers and the Mexicans.”
“You take these kids out of their schools and put them with blacks… They dragged the whole school down.’
“My God, Mexico’s nothiin’ but a big goddamn pigpen. Hell, look at Africa. They’ve been here for a lot longer than North America and they could be civilized and they’re the same way they were three or four hundred years ago.”
Some also blamed desegregation for irrevocably changing the character of Permian football…
He believed discipline had broken down. He believed the coaches allowed certain [black] players to get away with murder.
The pioneering blacks around Odessa who led the fight against desegregation ended up in prison for felonies such as larceny, arson, armed robbery, and perjury.
