Tuesday night President Clinton will hold a town meeting on race and sports to be broadcast on ESPN. According to one young writer, America's obsession with black athletic prowess encourages myths and stereotypes and makes her glad she grew a book worm, not a jock. Caille Millner is a freshman at Harvard University, and on the staff of YO! (Youth Outlook), a newspaper by and about young people published by Pacific News Service.

I don't play sports.

No "hoop dreams" for me. I've never wished I could race across the goal line for the winning touchdown or beat an opponent to a pulp. I'm the clumsy kid who gets jeered for missing the shot, the one always picked last.

That was tough when I was a kid. In my neighborhood, all the black and Latino kids played sports all the time -- you were expected to have a ball in your hands as soon as you could walk. If you didn't play, you were a punk.

I was a bookworm, even lower on the food chain. I spent a lot of time watching everyone else play. I was enthralled by the sight of those slim brown bodies bouncing up and down, throwing cuss words as easily as balls. At times I wished for their skills.

Now I'm almost glad.

I was brought up to read books instead of play sports. My mother never explained why but I see it now. As a black person in America, sports have the power to destroy me.

The relationship is a perverse one. Since pro sports opened to black players in the 1950s, black athletes have come to dominate basketball (80 percent of NBA players are black) and football (67 percent). This unquestionable success has been a mixed blessing at best. It has led many young men to see athletic prowess as a measure of manhood and an avenue to accomplishment, but these young men are building dreams around a nearly unattainable goal. Education is an afterthought, college a stepping stone to going pro.

Athletes are now among the black community's most visible heroes -- when did you last see Henry Louis Gates, Jr. or Randall Robinson on a Wheaties box? There's nothing wrong with admiring athletes, but the black community has elevated them above successful blacks in other areas.

For years, white Americans have believed in the myth that blacks must depend on physical, instead of mental, power -- small wonder that whites are comfortable with disproportionate numbers of blacks in athletics.

This is troubling because blacks have somehow accepted the myths themselves. Young blacks look at sports as a way out of poverty and denigration.

As an advocate of equal rights, I applaud the new women's basketball league and all the coverage of women's sports, but the fact that most of these athletes are black gives me cause for worry. In the past black women have not allowed sports to surpass education as a path to success. (Black women widely outnumber black men at universities and are more prominent in the business world as well.) But will the widening of the American sports machine make education less attractive to young black women?

There is nothing wrong with appreciating our people's athletic skills or with supporting them. Sports is fun and can be a great outlet for the stress of living in this society. The danger comes when the game overshadows the business of life. For young black men especially, playing sports must be secondary to getting an education.

A community does not uplift itself through jump shots and touchdowns by a select few. Only through a concerted communal effort can we break the shackles of poverty. Long-term, stable economic gain comes from education and professional work -- not from the body, which is notoriously unreliable over the long term.

Think about it -- not all black people can slam dunk, but we can all use our minds. Since renewing the black community's economic status depends on all of us, we had better pick a path that everyone can follow. By focusing solely on sports, we are keeping ourselves down.