This is the fundamental problem with AWARE Week. By boldly announcing a campaign "against racism and ethnocentrism"--and then devoting itself to the relatively inconsequential racial issues on this campus--AWARE Week dulls our vigilance against the serious stuff. At this week's festivities, the featured film is not Do the Right Thing or Mississippi Burning, but House Party (with a group discussion to follow, naturally).

When minority activists get so worked up over trifles, the average non-minority can reasonably conclude that (1.) Minorities don't have anything more important to worry about; and (2.) AWARE-types call everything racism.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many students dismiss all talk of racism as P.C. wolf-crying?

I'm not blind to racism; no one who has heard the word "nigger" uttered in anger can be. I'll never forget how the lone Black student in my local high school one year was taunted with the nickname "Spot," after a ditty sung to the tune of The Police's "King of Pain": There's a little black spot on the road today. A Black boy got in a white boy's way.

Nor can I forget the police officer in South Carolina who told me, a few months before I arrived at Harvard, how he and his fellow Klansmen liked to "work over the niggers."

Nothing, absolutely nothing at Harvard compares to this. To suggest that anything in the hearts of 99.44 percent of Harvard students remotely deserves the same name--"racism"--as this shameful hatred is to deprive the word of meaning. And to flagellate ourselves over our own imagined racism is worse than worthless--it's counterproductive.

SO WHAT can we guilt-ridden white liberals do? I suggest we reformulate the way we think about race and racism. Specifically, I would have us judge ourselves by a sort of categorical imperative of racial sensitivity: If everyone's attitudes about races were identical to my own, would society be acceptably just?

Under this standard, I can look at the AWARE Week posters that ask "Are you AWARE?" and answer, "Yes, thanks."

But AWARE Week sets up a much more stringent standard--an impossibly stringent standard, in fact. It asks us to identify and expunge every strand and fiber of insensitivity (as previously defined) from our consciousness. This standard encourages us to obsess about race, which, paradoxically, tends to let considerations of race intrude where they have no business and where they would not have arisen otherwise.

Under my standard, well-intentioned white liberals could resign themselves to be what they are: imperfect creatures trying to follow the Golden Rule. Better yet, this standard clearly establishes that people like me are the moral betters of those who advocate nonsense such as "Afrocentrism" and the superiority of "sun peoples" over "ice peoples."

But more immediately, my standard exempts me from any obligation to attend AWARE activities this week. After all, a world populated exclusively by people who thought like John Larew would cause no one injustice. If you can substitute your name for mine in that sentence, then AWARE Week won't help you much, either.

But it's just as well that way, because outside the gates of Harvard, there's racism and ethnocentricism to fight, and time's a-wasting.

I'll be busy working against racism and ethnocentrism.