(ThyBlackMan.com) Last night, I had watched a very powerful and impactful documentary that portrayed The 1988 Carter High School Football Team in a more sympathetic light than the negative portrayal from white nationalist media’s image of the “thuggish badboy” football team from the 2004 film of “Friday Night Lights”
The documentary is called “What Carter Lost” and it first appeared on national television a few weeks ago and I’ve always wanted to see it since I first read an article a month ago that The 1988 Carter High School Football Team would be featured in a documentary because in late March of this year, I wrote an article about that team after watching a movie about them called “Carter High”.
In my view, The 1988 Carter High School Football Team is the greatest high school football team ever assembled mainly because the offense and defense was absolutely stacked with talent so much that 28 of those players from that team went to college and over a fourth of them (8) actually went to play in the pros which is still a high school football record to this day.
In 1988, I was a little kid growing up in Montgomery under the most deplorable conditions that were deliberately forced upon me by the current social system in the form of poverty and despair. My grandma had to work a few jobs just to make ends meet so that we have food to eat and not only that, the place in Ridgecrest I remember living at the time was also infested with rats and roaches which made me felt like I was on an episode of “Hoarders”
Here are several lessons that can be learned from watching “What Carter Lost”
1. The System Is Anti-Black, Especially Anti-Black High School Athletic Program – When a predominant black athletic program is under “investigation”, the system does everything in its power to derail either the football or basketball team’s season by issuing swift punishments and penalties for predominant black high school athletic programs that “break their rules” that they clearly have no control over because the racial tensions between the predominant black and predominant white high schools and their football programs were very high back in the late 1980s along with the racial profiling with the negative stereotypes of “criminals and thugs” being thrown against predominant black high school football teams, particularly The 1988 Carter High School Football Team, but the system almost always let predominant white high school athletic programs off the hook for the same infractions that predominant black high school athletic programs are severely punished for.
2. The System Has Always Hated Black Success – Historically and today in this country, the system has always hated the idea of us achieving from a certain level of success to extreme success which is why they in typical white nationalist violence, have destroyed successful, thriving black neighborhoods not only for the interests of parasitic white capitalist economic projects like sports stadiums and interstates, but also to flood our community with police officers that currently function as an occupying military force in our community as evidenced whenever you hear code phrases like “Gang Unit”, “Street Crimes Unit”, “Drug Unit”, and “Robbery Unit”
A notorious example of the system’s historical hatred for black success is when the state couldn’t take down The 1988 Carter High School Football Team on the field, they decided to do every dirty scheme and trick in the book to try their hardest to take the team down off the field which happened a few years after Carter High won the 1988 5A State Championship by taking it away and giving it to the runner-up Judson High School.
3. Letting Too Much Fame And Success In Your Head Breeds Poor Choices – 6 of the players from The 1988 Carter High School 5A State Championship had allowed the fame and success of their championship season to get into their heads so much that it led them to make poor choices when they were among the 11 Carter High School students involved in an armed robbery spree for six months and those six former Cartier High Football players have since bettered themselves. One other lesson that can be learned from these young brothers poor choices off the field is that every decision you make as a black male in particular often comes with severe repercussions particularly at the hands of the state.
4. All-White Juries Are A Form Of White Nationalism – It’s no secret that the colonial judicial system has a very toxically parasitic incentive to lock up black people, especially black men in particular by any means necessary so that they can make money off of them because the colonial judicial system sees black men in this country as “criminals, thugs, and drug dealers” who don’t deserve a second chance” and also as economic commodities that they have historically and today made money off of.
An example of this type of white nationalism is when the six former Carter High School Football players were found guilty and convinced by an all-white jury and given very harsh sentences by a white nationalist judge from 13 to 25 years in prison, but the six former Carter High School Football players got out on parole after serving between 3 to 7 years in the pen.
The Conclusion – The main lesson that we can learn from The 1988 Carter High School Football Team is that the skills that are learned while playing football can also be used to achieve your full potential in other areas outside the gridiron.
Staff Writer; Kwame Shakir (aka Joe D.)
