MY FATHER LIKES to tell a joke about a man desperately searching a corner of a dark room illuminated only by a small lamp. When asked what he is doing, the man says that he has lost his wallet. Did he drop it in the corner? "No," the man replies. "But the light is better here".

In our rush to identify and combat racism, we've all become a bit like that man searching in the small, well-lit corner of an otherwise dark room. We search the familiar places even if what we want to find is nowhere nearby. That's what has been happening in Forsyth County, Georgia.

There was a time when American racism did not hide its face. Governors and police chiefs for instance, could be elected and re-elected espousing hate. Some even ran for President doing the same. To be against racism in the South back then was not easy; it required a great deal of courage. But at least the evil to be opposed was clear. Not so anymore.

WHEN THE KU Klux Klan and a group of rednecks disrupted a civil rights march through the all-white Georgia county, many were justifiably shocked and outraged. Coretta Scott King, for one, announced that the incident proved that racism was alive and well in the United States.

After violence disrupted the first march, 20,000 civil-rights supporters mounted a second one. The press hailed the march, calling it a demonstration of a renewed commitment to the fight against racism. But while the Klan's actions should not go unopposed, their actions must be kept in proper perspective.

Just what were the upper middle-class Blacks and whites who took part in the second Forsyth march protesting? Was it a revival of the Jim Crow mentality? Or was it the more subtle racism which now denies an equal opportunity to this nation's minorities? If they were protesting the latter, the protestors were marching down the wrong road.

Violent racism is dead. A generation ago, Birmingham's chief of police, Bull Connor, was sending dogs out to attack Blacks. Nowadays, the law--if not all the people--are on the side of Blacks. Powerless, frustrated whites hurling rocks at protesters in Forsyth is not evidence of the return of Connorism. Cummings, Georgia is not symbolic of the racism that exists in American today. Racism's current incarnation is as hidden as it is persistent.

THE KLANSMEN WHO disrupt protest marches are way out of the mainstream of American life. They are the locked-out, angry at a world which has passed turned on them. They are the people who call latenight radio call-in shows to ask--as one caller recently asked Larry King--"Why don't we have a national holiday in honor of the guy who blew King away?"

It's disturbing that there are people out there who would ask such questions. But what cannot be ignored is that they are powerless in our society, the exceptions to a new set of rules. That such overt, virulent racism today stands out serves as a reminder of the strides America has made in race relations. The racism that hinders the nation's minorities today is of a more genteel nature.

Less than 10 percent of Harvard undergraduates are Black while the portion of tenured Blacks in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is even smaller. Efforts to increase Black enrollment and faculty hirings routinely meet with rousing approval. The problem is, though, that the numbers never change.

In Washington, D.C., for instance, some 70 percent of the inhabitants are Black, but the only major newspaper in town is white-owned and the most affluent neighborhoods are white. The Black slums of D.C. have no white counterparts. It doesn't even seem to matter much that the mayor and the chief of police are Black.

THERE ARE TWO common responses to such phenomena, neither appropriate. The first is to blame the victims; the other is to search for a situation where racism presented itself in all its ugliness. "Then racism becomes a visible issue with clearly moral implications. But such occurrences are increasingly rare, for the KKK has little influence. The racism which plagues Black Americans today cannot be found in rural Georgia. It's more subtle but also more widespread.

In remember going to an anti-Klan march in Washington, D.C. in the midst of the Reagan recession. Tens of thousands of protesters turned out to prevent 10 Klansmen from marching down Pennsylvania Avenue--and were successful.

In the course of the protest the crowd began to shower police assigned to protect the Klansmen with bottles and rocks. The cops responded with tear gas. As I ran from the gas, I passed a Black man slumped against a statue. He held a placard. Its message? "We Want Jobs".

It's natural to want to confront groups such as the Klan. But in our zeal to combat the hate and evil they espouse, we must not forget the problems which are more difficult to solve, the evils which are less easy to see.