In the documentary Hoop Dreams we briefly follow the lives of two boys from inner city chicago as they try and follow their dreams of becoming professional basketball players. As the documentary starts out it is clear that basketball is a very important aspect of both the boys lives. Both boys are offered scholarships to play at St. Josephs which is a private highschool with a very good basketball program. Along with making the hour and a half commute to the school every morning the boys need to adapt to the new academic environment which is significantly more rigorous. The boys struggle and with William Gates being significantly behind on a grade level scale there is much academic work that needs to be done along with the effort that must be put into basketball. After only a year of being at the school Arthur Agee is forced to leave midway through a semester due to his inability to pay the amount of tuition that he does not have covered by scholarship. Along with losing his place at the school Arthur’s father is suffering from drug abuse and ends up going to jail. Even though William is still at the school after finding a sponsor to help him pay for the tuition increase he injured his knee and does not perform as well after recovery. William end up suffering throughout most of his highschool career without ever fully recovering from his injury. He ends up getting a scholarship to play at a college after just barely meeting the academic requirements to play. Arthur makes a sort of comeback in the sense that his senior year goes very well and he also ends up getting to play at a college after completing his summer school requirement. Throughout the documentary of these two teenagers lives we get a glimpse into the significant amount of struggle that they faced and how they tried to overcome it. After watching this I looked further into what happened in the rest of their lives and both Arthur’s father was murdered and William’s older brother, Curtis, was murdered as well. The drug abuse by Arthur’s father and the various instances of violence within the communities these two boys grew up in relate to the issues we are talking about in class. These two boys both saw basketball as a way out of their situations and the environment they lived in presented many challenges to achieving this goal. The long commute to the school and the lack of resources for their families made it particularly difficult for these boys to achieve their dreams. Do Amy Wax’s ideas in her book Race, Wrongs, and Remedies still apply to this situation or does the documentary help to shed light as to how many of the things that are plaguing inner city communities are out of the control of the people suffering? How does the documentary express ideas similar to that of the American dream and how does the documentary show that this dream may be unattainable?
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