“What do you want?!”: Black messianic masculinity in Netflix’s Last Chance U: Basketball

Focusing on Netflix’s Last Chance U: Basketball (LCUB) 2021–2022 docuseries, we interrogate how LCUB’s filmmakers frame the East Los Angeles College (ELAC) Huskies men’s basketball team’s performances of Black masculinity. At the intersections of race, gender, and class, we explore how LCUB’s storytelling invites its viewers to take a “good news” missionary orientation toward Black players and coaches and how that orientation contributes to a rhetorical economy of whiteness. The missionary orientation includes plotlines, religious motifs, and character arcs that work to veil the past and present structural inequalities that traumatize Black men in American society; further, the missionary orientation ties the deservedness of Black players and coaches to their willingness to accept faith, mentorship, selflessness, and obedience. Moreover, we argue LCUB constructs a reality within which ELAC Head Coach John Mosley embodies the paradoxes of performing Black messianic masculinity. Ultimately, we assert that LCUB pathologizes Blackness and sustains and inflates a rhetorical economy of whiteness. In doing so, we nuance how mediated texts, like sports docuseries, can encourage the use and exchange values inherent to a rhetorical economy of whiteness. Our analysis focuses on three main points: 1) how LCUB’s storytelling negotiates the deservedness of a Black athlete’s “way out;” 2) how filmmakers both promote and question Mosley’s performances of messianic masculinity; and 3) how a rhetorical economy of whiteness relies upon anti-Blackness and storytelling that consistently pathologizes Blackness.