Black athletes on parade.

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 Tiger Woods."

Woods now joins Michael Jordan among the company's most visibly promoted human icons. Jordan has been the object of criticism for his silence about Nike's horrible labor practices in its offshore production operations. (The stunning fact is that Nike pays him more than the annual payroll of its entire Indonesian workforce.) He has been criticized as well for not speaking out or being conspicuously active on behalf of black issues and causes. Woods, similarly, has been faulted by some for not being a vocal enough race man--though recent disclosures of racist threats and harassment he's received on the golf circuit give those objections a strange twist.

The fact that people have such expectations of athletes like Jordan and Woods is Jackie Robinson's ironic legacy. Robinson's stardom as a baseball player was inseparable from his political renown for breaking the color bar in a very visible arena of American culture. His views were solicited on all manner of political and social issues that concerned black Americans.

This was understandable, especially at the time: Robinson symbolically represented the goals of the burgeoning civil-rights movement and large social and political aspirations of black Americans much more broadly. At the same time, though, the spokesman status thrust onto him was both unfair to him (though he may not have bristled at it) and deeply troublesome politically. After all, Jackie Robinson had no special expertise for this role. He was a baseball player. Nor was he accountable to any particular body to speak in the name of black Americans.

In addition to carrying the weight of race spokesmanship, Robinson also faced constant scrutiny for deportment. Indeed, he was selected as the pathbreaker partly because of his articulate, All-American demeanor. And his agreement not to retaliate against affronts--no matter how bad--was a precondition of the whole arrangement.

In a racially just world, black athletes should not be expected to hold to a higher standard of behavior than whites. Nor should they be expected to shoulder the burden of racial activism. And do we really want the likes of Charles Barkley, the NBA's most prominent black Republican, or the Philadelphia 76ers' loutish rookie of the year, Alan Iverson, declaiming on social affairs in the name of black Americans?

Sure, it would be good and useful for Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods to exert pressure on Nike to clean up its dreadful labor practices. But the implication that they have some special obligation to do so because of their status as black--or in Woods's case, even Asian American--athletic icons is wrong.

Woods and Jordan have the right to be apolitical no less than Larry Bird, Pete Sampras, Wayne Gretzky, or Brady Anderson. Frank Thomas has the right to have grown up playing baseball without paying much attention to the sport's history, even the history of its desegregation, from which originates his opportunity to become wealthy playing it. When you boil off the self-righteous presumptions about special racial responsibility, Thomas's ignorance about Jackie Robinson is not really different from that of many young players who don't know much about the game's history or stars of the past. Reverence for, or even interest in, a sport's lore isn't a condition for being able to play it well; nor should it be.

The presumption that black athletes should shoulder greater social expectations at least bears a family resemblance to the persisting myth of special black athletic prowess, which in turn, works to perpetuate the worst stereotypes and to undermine the careers of black professional athletes in general.

On the average, blacks in pro baseball and football perform somewhat better statistically than their white counterparts. At first glance this fact may seem to lend credence to the claim that blacks are more gifted. The reality, however, is quite the opposite: Marginal black players are more likely than comparably talented whites to get weeded out along the way.

The myth of black athletic superiority leads scouts and coaches to evaluate black athletes with higher expectations in mind. So the black player needs to exhibit a higher level of skill or performance to impress.

Black athletes who don't perform up to inflated expectations are more likely to be characterized as lazy, malingering, or otherwise possessed of bad attitudes. In 1980, for example, Houston Astros' star pitcher J.R. Richard nearly died when he suffered a career-ending stroke on the field. He had been complaining of weakness for some time, but when no clear medical basis for his complaint was detected right away, the reaction of the Astros' management and the Houston media was to attack Richard for dogging it, even though Richard had been among the league's leaders in innings pitched for several years. After he collapsed, a medical exam disclosed a blood clot. Earlier treatment would probably have saved his career as the most dominating pitcher in baseball.

Frank Robinson and Roberto Clemente have been enshrined on the highest echelon of Major League's pantheon of heroes, and rightly so. When they were playing, though, the story was different. The Cincinnati Reds traded Robinson, claiming he was too old at twenty-nine, because the club considered him to have a bad attitude. Pittsburgh Pirates management and the local media circulated similar complaints about Clemente. Both men were rapped as surly or moody, and both were plagued by rumors that their inevitable submission to slumps or late-season exhaustion stemmed from being weakened by the ravages of syphilis, thereby getting the black hypersexuality stereotype into the picture. What prompted these judgments? Both men simply sought to conduct themselves with a measure of dignity; they presumed a right to be treated with equal respect.

Booker T. Washington said blacks should be "patient suffering, slow to anger," and that is the downside of Jackie Robinson's legacy, though it's hardly his fault. The public imagery of Jackie Robinson's accomplishment and ordeal has been used as a justification for preaching quiescence in the name of moral superiority. Robinson's "quiet dignity" was frequently invoked, for example, against more aggressive black radicalism in the 1960s. (Recently, even The Nation--in its continuing drive to become the respectably liberal, loyal edge of Clintonism--published a ludicrous article exhorting blacks in South Carolina to draw on the race's legacy of demonstrated moral superiority and thus defuse the state's controversy over the public display of the Confederate battle flag by embracing the flag and revalorizing it as a symbol of a racially democratic New South.)

As a professional athlete and as a black person, Jackie Robinson fought to bring into existence a world in which he and others would be able to pursue their craft on an equal basis with everyone else, without the fetters of stereotypes or invidious, unfair expectations and double standards. A world, that is, in which a ballplayer would be simply a ballplayer. That quest--obviously just and proper in its own right--had much broader ramification in 1947. Why? Because a dynamic political movement spurred it along.

It's not only unreasonable and unfair to expect athletes to adopt any public role other than simply as athletes; it's also a waste of time.

Adolph Reed Jr. teaches political science at Northwestern. His latest work, "W.E.B. DuBois and American Political Thought," will be published this July by Oxford University Press.