RACE RELATIONS at Harvard is a touchy subject. Although most white students here are quick to affirm their lack of prejudice, they find their liberal beliefs hard to reconcile with the de facto black self-segregation in dining halls and House rooms. Loud parties and cold stares even seem at times to be signs of outright black hostility. Whites turned out by the hundreds last year to walk picket lines in support of the Mass Hall black takeover, but once the occupation ended, the familiar checkerboard pattern was re-established in the dining halls.

White students bewildered by the racial separatism usually frame their questions in the wrong way. They wonder why the blacks seem troubled, why they feel the need for this usually harmless but just as cutting separation. Underlying these questions, which are typically expressed in hushed whispers by whites after skirting an all-black dining table, is the assumption that black students are at fault, that they are either afraid of contact with whites, or worse, that the blacks are racists in reverse. Separatist black behavior is seen as somehow aberrant, as a puzzling deviation from a harmonious norm.

This attitude reflects an ignorance of Harvard's racist past, a history of bias that sometimes intrudes into the present. The University prior to the middle sixties enrolled only a handful of blacks--two dozen in the entire College as late as 1965--and treated them as unwelcome guests. Harvard would understandably like to shove this aspect of its past out of mind, but a recognition of it is essential to comprehending race relations here today.

A senior Administration official last month was praising the activities of a group of freshmen--the Memorial Society--who have taken it upon themselves to post metal plaques in Yard rooms. The project has functional as well as historical value, the official effused. "Think if a struggling black freshmen could know that W.E.B. DuBois '88 had once lived in his room," the official said. A student reminded him that DuBois, like the other few blacks that trickled through Harvard at the time, was refused room accommodations, and had to live in a garret somewhere off campus.

Willful and pervasive racism happily has been a casualty of the activist sixties. An appreciable number of blacks now attend school here and we even have a handful of black Faculty members. But echoes from the past continue to resound periodically. Former Dean Dunlop's long and largely successful war with the Afro-American Studies Department, for example, had racist overtones. Although Martin L. Kilson, professor of Government, was honest and outspoken in his interest in black studies and his proposals for changing the program, it is hard to find a rationale for Dunlop's actions. Even if the former dean sincerely thought the Department was being mismanaged, he went to suspiciously great lengths to attempt to level it, including sabotaging the formation of the DuBois Institute. Incompetence had persisted in other departments of the Faculty without incurring the full force of Dunlop's wrath.

HARVARD'S RACISM, however, is usually not so direct. It generally surfaces as an unthinking attitude of paternalism. The dispute over the University's ownership of Gulf stock provides a good example of this sort of implicit racism. Both the University's ownership of Gulf stock provides a good example of this sort of implicit racism. Both the University and the black protesters agreed on the central issue: Harvard should use its ownership of the stock in some way to aid black Angolans. The students suggested divestiture to make an impact on the public and fuel a nationwide Gulf boycott campaign. The University listened, patted the blacks on the head and said no: it had a better solution. It told the blacks that Harvard would keep the stock and work for change within the company. The blacks were right about goals--but Harvard, of course, knew best about tactics.

Even without assessing the evidence of the past few years, a crucial, central fact remains: Harvard was for many years a racist institution. Blacks today are surely not paranoid when they doubt that the past has been totally repudiated in a short half-decade. Race relations at Harvard cannot be considered divorced from this historical setting.

The attitudes of white students must also contribute to the desire by many blacks to stay apart. Students from all-white high schools, eager to build friendships with their new Harvard neighbors, are often unwittingly betrayed by their naivete. Many whites, for example, seem to think all blacks live in housing projects, and arrogantly frown upon middle class blacks as atypical or somehow extra-privileged.

The frivolous behavior of many white students must also repel blacks, most of whom have little desire to major in Mongolian or frolic in a club while their central cities crumble. Competitive whites in school for no purpose beyond personal gain must appear bizarre to most blacks, who were socialized in a more communal, and in many ways more humane environment.

In short, the benign apartheid here is perfectly comprehensible. It is not absolute, and some friendships are made between blacks and whites. Although inter-racial contact is far from being unhindered, the barriers seem to be slowly dissolving. But they are still very real, and a semi-separate society will probably continue here for some time. No amount of white hand-wringing can change that.

The separation is not explained by the personal quirks of black students. It is a culmination of the virulent racism in Harvard's past, and good wishes will not easily will it away.