Hoosiers: This Gene Hackman Classic Is Now ‘Racist’
The death of actor Gene Hackman, under what are still unusual circumstances, prompted me to watch one of his more famous works, Hoosiers, and, afterward, I learned that modern liberal thought brands it as racist.
I had seen Hoosiers many years ago, but I did not recall a lot about it, other than it was a sports movie, inspired by a real-life high school basketball coach in the early 1950s. The coach and his team defeated overwhelming odds and won an Indiana state championship.
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The movie is worth a watch, but when actor Billy Bob Thornton and others call it the greatest sports movie of all time, they’re probably exaggerating. Rocky, Karate Kid, and The Wrestler immediately stand out as much better storytelling. Hoosiers is a bit too sappy and sentimental for my tastes, and the editing could use a tune-up.
With all of that aside, I had a hunch halfway through Hoosiers that a movie that came out in 1986 and was set in the 1950s and glorified an all-white basketball team would probably be deemed racist by contemporary standards. I came to believe that even more so in the third act when the rival team at the high school basketball championship was racially integrated.
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I Googled whether certain contemporary critics had tried to tarnish Hoosiers as a racist film. Sure enough…my suspicions proved correct.
One critic called Hoosiers “a deeply conservative movie” that idealized the 1950s and positioned “a coach as an unassailable authority figure.”
“It also puts the audience in the position to root for an all-white team and treat them as underdogs in the 1950s,” the critic wrote.
There are plenty more reviews like this.
Never mind the fact that the movie never once made an issue of race and certainly never disrespected people of color in any way.
Never mind the fact that even the most recent numbers show that even in 2025 blacks make up only 12 percent of Indiana’s population. We have to assume that that number in 1953 was far less than it is now.
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Eight years ago, Christopher Nolan released an historically accurate film about the events of Dunkirk, set in France during World War II. No blacks that we know of were involved in those events. Heck, no women that we knew of were involved…nevertheless, critics savaged the movie as racist and sexist and criticized it for its “lack of gender and racial diversity.”
I have more to say about how political correctness has started to ruin great literature and movies.
More on that tomorrow.
Special thanks to Warhammer’s Wife for proofreading this story before publication to make certain there were no misspellings, grammatical errors or other embarrassing mistakes and/or typos. Follow Warhammer on X @Real_Warhammer. Read Warhammer’s stories on RVIVR by clicking here.
