Black Students example essay topic

Though the movie School Ties takes place decades before the movie Higher Learning, there are many similarities. These movies show us that students on any campus in any year have always faced the same problems. These problems being racism, finding a peer group and finding financial aid. These movies show how the different groups keep their distinctiveness.

Racism doesn t have to occur between people with different skin colours. It can be all the other religious denominations in a school discriminating against a single Jewish student as was the case in School Ties. Or it can be skinheads climbing up on a bell tower trying to kill as many black students as possible. The movie school ties is about a star football player, who happens to be Jewish going to a private high school in the 1950's. He comes from a working class family and his only way of fitting in with the preppy, who while unknowingly, openly insult his religion in front of him other students is to bond with the other football players. That is his niche.

In Higher Learning all of the characters try to belong with other groups. The black runner who is on a full scholarship after being threatened by skinheads hangs around with all the other black students who are almost a Black Panther's like group. When a small town kid from Iowa can t belong with any group he starts hanging around with white supremacists just to belong and eventually they corrupt him and he starts believing their propaganda and takes it to the extreme by climbing a bell tower and trying to kill as many non white students as he can. Lastly in the movie Higher Learning their is a young sexually inexperienced white female from a working class background who experiments with bisexualism. All of these students jus join these groups even if they don t really feel the way the others do, just to obtain a sense of unity with others like them. Both of these movies also show how difficult it is for students to afford to attend these places of higher learning.

In School Ties the main character is only attending this prestigious school to benefit their football team. The severity of this is shown when he misses a sacred Jewish holiday to play a football game. To the University he is only a Football player and if he isn t winning football games for them he isn t worth paying for. In school matters we encounter the same scenario. With the black track star. When he starts slacking off and missing practices the coach changes his full scholarship to a partial scholarship and he doesn t have enough money to pay for his tuition.

Once again in show how Universities are just businesses looking to make money like any other. The last similarity in the movies is culture. More specifically pop culture. In both movies much like in modern society, groups of people who hang around together tend to dress similar and in the same style and listen to the same music. In school ties all the students could wear whatever appropriate dress clothing they wish but the more trendier students always wore a school tie.

In higher learning the skinheads all had tattoos of swastikas and Nazi seals. They wore dark clothing with wife beater undershirts, had the same hair cut and listened to punk music. The black student's also had their own style they dressed in, resembling the Fresh Prince of Bel Air's style and listened to Rap Music. On the topic of Music the love Fest music festival. Run by the bisexual curious female student designed to unite the student body gathered all the student's together making it easier for the sniper to pick targets. If you notice the ways these students interact with each other in each movie are similar, even when compared to the activities of our student body it is almost eerie how so little has changed in the last 50 years.

We all do things maybe even things we don t agree with to fell as though we belong. Some things we may regret later in life. These to movies show that how even though time changes, some things always stay the same.