THE ARRIVAL OF AWARE Week (Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism) '91 reminds me of two things. The first is a Crimson editorial I wrote when I was a sophomore in which I castigated my fellow students for their apparent apathy toward the first AWARE Week festivities. The second is the incident that led me to write the editorial.

I was a first-year visiting Central Square for the first time. I was buying something or another, and the store was full of Black men--young, muscular, vaguely threatening. In my pocket was a wad of bills--about $80. Afraid to expose so much money to a crowd of potential muggers, I carefully extracted a single $10 bill from my pocket without revealing the rest.

On the way home, I was acutely ashamed of my unease. No amount of post facto rationalizing (It was a high-crime neighborhood, I'm just not used to being in the city), could erase the fear that a dangerous, latent racism lurked beneath my avowedly liberal exterior.

AWARE Week, the essential purpose of which is to encourage students to recognize and confront these subtle prejudices, came along as I was wrestling with this contradiction. What a perfect opportunity, I thought, for everyone to go through a cathartic experience like mine.

Hence, my indignation at the paltry turnout.

Like a lot of things I thought and wrote during my first two years at Harvard, I no longer stand behind those sentiments. Like a lot of people at Harvard, I now think AWARE Week, as it is currently constituted, is a waste of time and effort, albeit an especially well-intentioned waste.

IN THE KEYNOTE SPEECH of the first-ever AWARE Week in 1989, Colgate psychologist John Dovidio told the gathered penitents that 15 percent of Americans are overtly racist, while the remaining 85 percent are racists and don't realize it. The message was clear: AWARE Week intends to dig out that hidden fiber of racism and hang it out for view, thus comforting the aggrieved and assuaging the consciences of the offenders. This week's agenda is loaded with the same stuff: a workshop on "Addressing Issues of Personal Racism," a panel discussion on "Multiculturalism in the Ivory Tower," and so on.

I don't mean to dispute the existence of unconscious prejudice. Controlled social-psychological experiments have demonstrated that fair-minded, unbigoted subjects can let race cloud their judgment and alter their behavior. But psychology also tells us that humans are cognitively incapable of assessing every situation and every person without reference to established categories. That is to say, prejudice at some level is a human frailty that cannot be wholly eliminated, but can only be acknowledged and ameliorated

This sort of self-analysis has inspired a slew of Crimson columns of the White Liberal Guilt genre. One writer, in a piece aptly headlined "Liberal, Open-Minded Racist?", reported asking Assistant Dean Hilda Hernandez-Gravelle '76 (the brains behind AWARE Week) how to root out his shameful fear of approaching large Black men at night. Her reply: "You should experience large Black men in groups for yourself."

Actually, that seems pretty reasonable, and that's one of the benefits of Harvard's diversity. Still, we don't need AWARE Week to accomplish it.

SO WHAT USEFUL PURPOSE does AWARE Week serve? None that I know of. It gives guilt-stricken white liberals a chance to attend rap sessions at which they can engage in a sort of Maoist ritual self-criticism and confess to committing sins they can't even specify, much less remember.

But we must be doing something wrong. The problem must be pretty severe, too; otherwise, a prestigious university wouldn't go to such great lengths to solve it, right? As the police told the confused protagonist of Franz Kafka's The Trial, "[T]he high authorities we serve, before they would order such an arrest as this, must be quite well informed about the reasons."

Now I'm not naive enough to contend that there is no racism at Harvard. Every so often, an ugly racist incident surfaces to disabuse us of that notion. Nevertheless, instances of genuine, hateful racism are exceedingly rare (I can think of three publicized cases during my four years) and are inevitably condemned from all quarters when they occur.

So if the purpose of AWARE Week is to create an atmosphere in which race-hatred is unacceptable...good news! Such an atmosphere already exists. But if the purpose is to reform the miscreants...bad news. Anyone inclined to scrawl "KKK" on a laundry room door (as happened a few years ago) probably won't attend any AWARE Week events. AWARE Week is an extreme case of preaching to the converted.

WITH NO OBVIOUS ENEMY to engage, AWARE Week is left to tilt at the windmill of "racial insensitivity," (provisionally defined as "any speech or action that offends three or more members of any minority group"). Though a nebulous evil, insensitivity is assumed to be not only pervasive, but just as harmful as actual racism.