Comparing and Contrasting the Intercollegiate Careers of Charlie Scott and the Fab Five or The Intersection of Space, Place, and Race within the White Imaginary

Abstract

This paper attempts to examine the impact of the white imaginary on male Black athletes in two different historical and geo-political spaces. The intercollegiate careers of Charlie Scott, the first Black student to attend UNC on an athletic scholarship in 1966, and the University of Michigan’s 1991 basketball recruiting class, popularly known as the Fab Five exemplify the power of the white imaginary in these different temporal and geo-political locations. The imagined racial progress that threads together the white constructions of who, and what, Charlie Scott and the Fab Five were, conflates with the broader belief that racial progress has been made, and that race relations, in the U.S, continue to get better. This imagined racial progress simultaneously demonizes Black, masculine, bodies that attempt to obtain racial equity that challenge, or fall outside of, white, patriarchal, cultural norms. Examining Scott and the Fab Five within these contexts calls for the recognition that their intercollegiate experiences are invested in, and dispute, white notions of racial progress, especially as they interact with white constructions of Black masculinity.