ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 22, 1997 TAG: 9704220042
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
TIGER WOODS has America thinking new thoughts about golf. Will he also get us thinking new thoughts about race?
There's little to add about this 21-year-old phenom's domination of The Masters tournament: youngest and first black winner of that prestigious event, with the lowest score and widest margin of victory ever - and all within days of the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's transforming entry into major league baseball.
Seasoned golfers, noting his fine intelligence and picture-perfect swing, are rethinking the physical possibilities of the game, and people who had never watched three consecutive holes of golf are talking about taking it up - or urging their children to do so.
But what intrigues me about this lanky kid is his induction into that tiny cadre of black people who have managed - in the eyes of both blacks and whites - to transcend race.
Even as I write the words, I confess I don't know precisely what I mean. It may be easier to name members of that exclusive group than to describe the characteristics that place them in it. Colin Powell. Bryant Gumbel. Arthur Ashe. Ron Brown.
What? Are they all men? I don't know, though it does occur to me that the names that come to mind when I think of the most famous of the race transcenders all belong to men - and now that I think of it, mostly to cafe au lait men who have succeeded in areas (or at levels) formerly restricted to whites. Is that part of it?
Maybe, but I know lots of lighter-skinned successful black men who do not seem to me to be a part of the group, and some darker ones who do. Bill Cosby, Vernon Jordan and Michael Jordan? Probably. Grant Hill seems a near-cinch to get there. In addition, the last two are successful in an area where black success is the norm. Doug Wilder, David Dinkins and Charley Pride - breakthrough successes all - are not (to my mind) race-transcendent. Is Ed Brooke? David Robinson? Ed Bradley?
The transcenders who come to mind are well-educated and articulate, characteristics that may be necessary to transcendence but are hardly sufficient. Nor is being unself-consciously black (or self-consciously unblack). Clarence Thomas doesn't make the list. Shelby Steele and J.C. Watts don't make it.
It isn't clear that you can get there by trying, or that getting there is any particular compliment. It may be that some people simply are that way - that some combination of self-confidence and self-evident success leads them to see themselves not as unblack but as not merely, not primarily, black. And maybe these same qualities lead whites to see them in the same way.
Tiger Woods, of course, is not primarily black, even genetically. His mother is Thai, and his father's heritage includes white and Native American as well as black strains. But, then, the youngster was careful to pay his respects to Jackie Robinson and to Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder and Ted Rhodes, who did for golf what Robinson did for baseball.
Besides, most black Americans are not pure African (even though most of us don't want to talk about it). Will the lionization of the young Tiger (accepted by blacks as a brother and by whites as a lot more than that) help all of us get past some of our silliest racial attitudes? Will he help push the trend already under way of describing as ``biracial'' children who, a generation ago, would be labeled simply ``black''?
Do the transcendent ones, who manage to be both black and mainstream, hold out the hope that all of us have the potential of reaching the mainstream? Do they reflect the oft-voiced view that white people will always allow a few of us to make it (while making sure that most of us don't)?
Do they represent, as Jackie Robinson did half a century ago, the first wave of full integration (at least on the playing field)? Could they become America's version of South Africa's ``Cape Coloureds'' - less a bridge than a buffer between the races?
Maybe in the end they are none of these things, but merely their own transcendent selves.
- WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP
LENGTH: Medium: 77 linesby CNB