The Face of the Game.

Mitchelson, Ronald L.; Lazaro, Michael T.

This paper investigates the spatial accessibility of African Americans to golf as an example of continued social injustice. Because of its developmental diversity, demographic diversity, and rich golf history, North Carolina is chosen to examine the relationship between the spatial distributions of golf courses and African Americans. Most previous analyses of golf and ethnicity have focused on other dimensions of inaccessibility and have ignored the spatial dimension. Despite the impression that is left by Tiger Woods' success and notoriety, African Americans remain disproportionately inaccessible to golf An index of net accessibility, controlling for market size, indicates that census tracts with high percentages of African-American population also are unexpectedly underserved with golf The correlation between net access and percent black is -.56. Inaccessibility is illustrated in rural, metropolitan, elite golf resort, and coastal geographic settings. This case study illustrates the outcomes of profound power relations and tensions that are played out on carefully crafted islands of privilege that signify humanity's power over nature and its willingness to exclude portions of itself from the fruits of that power.

UNITED States; AFRICAN Americans; CASE studies; ETHNIC groups; MULTICULTURALISM; GOLF resorts

Southeastern Geographer, 2004, Vol 44, Issue 1, p48

0038-366X

Academic Journal

10.1353/sgo.2004.0010