It strikes me that somewhere along the line, African-Americans have passed a milestone that has gone largely unnoticed.

That’s probably a good thing, because I’m not sure it was one worth celebrating —at least not yet.

The parade of black leaders to the courthouse, the forced-retirement home or the top of the newscast for legal or ethical lapses makes one long for a time not that long ago when circumstances demanded something more.

Instead, we get much less today. Consider:

By every appearance, David A. Paterson’s office interfered in a top aide’s domestic-assault case and obstructed justice in a way that has jeopardized his already tenuous hold on the governor’s mansion.

Charlie Rangel has played fast and loose with so many financial regulations, to his personal benefit, that he may well get permanently bounced as House Ways and Means Committee chairman, after temporarily stepping aside Wednesday.

Brian Davis is already gone from the Common Council for pocketing campaign funds and trying to cover it up.

And Antoine Thompson—obviously a slow learner, considering the aforementioned teaching aids—thinks the height of a budgetary and governmental crisis is the perfect time for our state senator to mysteriously disappear on a Jamaican junket disguised as a business trip.

What were they thinking?

Obviously, they weren’t thinking the way African-Americans, by necessity, used to think. Every black of a certain age had a grandmother or other elderly relative ready to ground him whenever he went on a chimerical flight that ignored the rules, written and unwritten, about what was allowed.

With a smile and a shake of the head, she would slap him back to reality with the admonition, “Boy, don’t you know you can’t do what those white folks do!”

It was a time when most blacks knew that they had to be a little bit smarter, dress a little bit better and speak a little more properly just to get a foot in the door—and then behave with a little more rectitude once they got there.

Obviously, it’s not a time anyone wants to go back to. But in some ways, it had its advantages for a race mired in second-class citizenship and forced, like Avis, to try harder.

Fast-forward to today, when black leaders apparently believe they actually can do what those white folks do—and they have the political troubles to prove it. Seduced by some semblance of post- ’60s faux equality, they no longer feel constrained in ways that kept most of their predecessors on a higher ethical plane, forced to carry the weight of representing a race constantly on trial.

Freed from that “burden,” black leaders today no longer feel compelled to behave any better than the likes of Eliot Spitzer or Alan Hevesi, whites bounced from office after their own scandals.

We have overcome. But if this is what it means, I’m not sure it was worth it.

It’s not worth it because by any objective measure—the unemployment rate, the poverty rate, the earnings gap, the wealth gap—blacks, as a whole, remain second-class citizens.

African-Americans can’t afford leaders who squander the power needed to change that and who can’t grasp the fact that there still is a burden, either because they are too blind to recognize it or too self-absorbed to acknowledge it.

Yes, I suppose it can be seen as a mark of growing equality that so many black leaders no longer feel the need to behave any better than their white counterparts.

Take it as a sign of progress, if you must.

But if that’s true, it means African- Americans have come a long way— backward.