BLACK ATHLETES ON PARADE
Reed, Adolph Jr.
CLASS NOTES Adolph Reed Jr. 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...
...How many black people were on the Harvard Law School faculty or teaching in predominantly white universities thirty years ago, much less earlier...
...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...
...This is, of course, a self-discrediting argument...
...In a racially just world, black athletes should not be expected to hold to a higher standard of behavior than whites...
...persona isn't flamboyant or especially controversial...
...he also was called upon to pay homage to Charlie Sif-ford, Lee Calvin Peete, Lee Elder, and other black trailblazers on the PGA tour...
...Jordan has been the object of criticism for his silence about Nike's horrible labor practices in its offshore production operations...
...Tiger Woods's Masters victory made him a social spokesman for black athletes...
...In 1980 for example, Houston Astros' star pitchei J.R...
...A world, that is, in which a ballplayer would be simply a ballplayer...
...it's also a waste of time.B...
...It's a familiar pattern...
...Indeed, he was selected as the pathbreaker partly because of his articulate...
...He was a baseball player...
...He's a clean-cut, articulate, and apparently earnest young man whose public Adolph Reed Jr...
...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...
...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...
...Robinson's "quiet dignity" was frequently invoked, for example, against more aggressive black radicalism in the 1960s...
...It's not only unreasonable and unfair to expect athletes to adopt any public role other than simply as athletes...
...And do we really want the likes of Charles Barkley, the NBA's most prominent black RepubhcM or the Philadelphia 76ers' loutish rookies the year, Alan Iverson, declaiming on m cial affairs in the name of black Ameil cans...
...He has been criticized as well for not speaking out or being conspicuously active on behalf of black issues and causes...
...That reasoning is either a straight-up rightist canard or a more or less willfully naive, ostrich-like evasion...
...Frank Robinson and Roberto Clemente have been enshrined on the highest echelon of Major League's pantheon of heroes, and rightly so...
...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...
...And his agreement not to retaliate against affronts—no matter how bad—was a precondition of the whole arrangement...
...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...
...All along he has been trumpeted as a "role model" for black—and Asian American— kids...
...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...
...Because a dynamic political movement spurred it along...
...In addition to carrying the weight of race spokesmanship, Robinson also faced constant scrutiny for deportment...
...nor should it be...
...Sure, it would be good and useful f|| Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods to exifc} pressure on Nike to clean up its dread^i labor practices...
...But the implication thft they have some special obligation to do 4 because of their status as black—orj| Woods's case, even Asian American—athletic icons is wrong...
...The reality, however, is quite the opposite: Marginal black players are more likely than comparably talented whites to get weeded out along the way...
...Both men simply sought to conduct themselves with a measure of dignity...
...The ensuing controversy centered on Thomas's—and, by extension, other black athletes'—larger social and racial obligations...
...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...
...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...
...What prompted these judgments...
...Ail-American demeanor...
...Reverence for, or even interest in, a sport's lore isn't a condition for being able to play it well...
...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...
...The fact that people have such expectations of athletes like Jordan and Woods is Jackie Robinson's ironic legacy...
...they presumed a right to be treated with equal respect...
...Woods's responses seemed reasonable enough and genuine...
...But while there has been undeniable progress, racialized expectations still prevail—especially in sports...
...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...
...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...
...Nor should they be expected to shoulder the burden of racial activism...
...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...
...At first glance this fact may seem to lend credence to the claim that blacks are more gifted...
...That quest— obviously just and proper in its own right—had much broader ramification in 1947...
...Nor was he accountable to any particular body to speak in the name of black Americans...
...This theme of special obligation also figured into the Tiger Woods hype...
...Earlier treatment would probably have saved his career as the most dominating pitcher in baseball...
...several years ago I saw Derek Bell, then a tenured Harvard Law professor, flamboyantly push a version of the same line...
...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...
...DuHois and American Political Thought...
...His views were solicited on all manner of political and social issues that concerned black Americans...
...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...
...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...
...After he collapsed, a medical exam disclosed a blood clot...
...Pittsburgh Pirates management and the local media circulated similar complaints about Clemente...
...So the black player needs to exhibit a higher level of skill or performance to impress...
...When they were playing, though, the story was different...
...H< had been complaining of weakness foi 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...
...Woods now joins Michael Jordan among the company's most visibly promoted human icons...
...W.L.lt...
...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...
...The stunning fact is that Nike pays him more than the annual payroll of its entire Indonesian workforce...
...Richard nearly died when he sufferec a career-ending stroke on the Held...
...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...
...The myth of black athletic superiority leads scouts and coaches to evaluate black athletes with higher expectations in mind...
...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...
...The Cincinnati Reds traded Robinson, claiming he was too old at twenty-nine, because the club considered him to have a bad attitude...
...will be published this July by Oxford University Press...
...His latest work...
...reaches political science at Northwestern...
...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...
...Woods and Jordan have the right to be apolitical no less than Larry Bird, Pete Sampras, Wayne Gretzky, or Brady Anderson...
...After all, Jackie Robinson had no special expertise for this role...
...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...
Vol. 61 • July 1997 • No. 7
