Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

In Odessa, playing high school football was many Black students’ best chance to earn the respect of their peers and teachers and potentially gain post-secondary opportunities such as football scholarships. Bissinger’s book is critical of this reality and questions how much their participation in football truly serves Black players compared to what they offered the school board, coaches, and town as a whole. By discussing Odessa’s history of explicitly racist policies and attitudes, including segregation, the author provides the reader with the necessary context to understand the extent of anti-Black racism in the town. Bissinger grapples with the fact that football seemed to be the one activity where Black and white people in Odessa had any significant, positive interactions with each other. One white resident remarks, “We don’t have to deal with Blacks here […]. We don’t have to have any contact with them, except on the Permian football team. It’s the only place in Odessa where people interact at all with Blacks” (116).

However, Bissinger does not use this fact to argue that football was a tool for social unification and interracial integration in Odessa. Instead, the author questions to what extent Black players were being used by the white school board and white coaches to further the Permian Panthers program while the Black community remained ostracized and oppressed.