Black athletes on parade.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Sociopolitical responsibilities of African American sports stars - Column

It's difficult to be patient with the argument that the crossover popularity of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Bill Cosby or Oprah Winfrey proves that racial injustice has been defeated. That reasoning is either a straight-up rightist canard or a more or less willfully naive, ostrich-like evasion.

Equally frustrating is the "nothing-has-changed-since-slavery" line that seems to have gained currency in black political discourse as the realities of the Jim Crow world slip out of collective memory. Recently I was on a panel with a black political scientist who insisted that things had gotten no better for black people in this country since 1619; several years ago I saw Derek Bell, then a tenured Harvard Law professor, flamboyantly push a version of the same line. This is, of course, a self-discrediting argument. How many black people were on the Harvard Law School faculty or teaching in predominantly white universities thirty years ago, much less earlier?

But while there has been undeniable progress, racialized expectations still prevail--especially in sports.

Tiger Woods's Masters victory ma3e him a social spokesman for black athletes. It's a familiar pattern. Woods was not only expected to comment on how his accomplishment, as the first black winner of the most Southern of all PGA tournaments, related to Jackie Robinson; he also was called upon to pay homage to Charlie Sifford, Lee Calvin Peete, Lee Elder, and other black trailblazers on the PGA tour.

Woods's responses seemed reasonable enough and genuine. His acknowledgement that he had paused on the last hole of the last Masters round to reflect that he was walking a path carved by his black predecessors was even affecting.

By contrast, Chicago White Sox star Frank Thomas created a bit of a media stir by admitting that he doesn't know much about Jackie Robinson or his sport's racial history. The ensuing controversy centered on Thomas's--and, by extension, other black athletes'--larger social and racial obligations.

This theme of special obligation also figured into the Tiger Woods hype. All along he has been trumpeted as a "role model" for black--and Asian American--kids. He's a clean-cut, articulate, and apparently earnest young man whose public persona isn't flamboyant or especially controversial. Nike, evoking the concluding scene from Spike Lee's Malcolm X, projects Woods as such a role model in an ad that quick-cuts to nonwhite kids all over the globe who proclaim, seriatim: "I am...