ON WEDNESDAY night at Sanders Theatre, the University's most distinguished speaking venue, there was Black and there was white.

There was an orchestra section and a mezzanine section. Hah-vahd and Harvard. Sun and ice. Cheering and hissing. The spoken to and the spoken at.

And there was Leonard Jeffries.

There was also some common ground. Most students felt shock and anger--over something. Some had even more intense emotions.

The glaring racial and ethnic polarization at the Jeffries' speech arose partly from the content of the talk. But it mainly arose from members of the audience watching their fellow students respond to the speaker: as a hero or a racist, an academic or an anti-Semite, a leader in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or that of David Duke.

THERE IS NO longer any doubt why the BSA invited Jeffries to Harvard. And it's certainly not because he speaks flawless French.

"We endorse [Jeffries'] Blackness as a Black individual and a Black intellectual," said BSA president Art A. Hall '93 last weekend. "But as far as agreement with his viewpoints, that's another side of the issue."

Apparently not. That side of the issue was cleared up Wednesday night, when the spectators in the orchestra section--exclusively members of the BSA and other sponsoring organizations--cheered Jeffries at every turn of his speech.

Applause was directed not at his melanin but at his message. In no uncertain terms, Jeffries views met applause, approval and endorsement from most--if not all--of the "sun people" in the orchestra.

So it went when Jeffries made one of his more egregious claims of inherent Black racial superiority: "African genes are dominant genes and European genes are recessive genes."

So it went when Jeffries, reflecting his obsession with and hatred of the Jews, commented on the Holocaust: "Adolf Hitler is not my problem."

So it went when Jeffries, echoing other Black luminaries who see themselves as cult hero-victims oppressed by a racist media, dismissed Crimson editor J. Eliot Morgan's charge that Jeffries threatened his life in an interview: "He never had an interview," he said.

So it went when Jeffries, challenged by a questioner citing historical sources over the degree of Jewish involvement in forming the Dutch East India Company, answered: "Form a study group."

IN GENERAL, a student group at Harvard lends legitimacy to the content of a speaker's message by inviting him or her to campus to speak to that group's particular concerns.

That's why Hillel members not only did not invite the late Meir Kahane to speak at Harvard but walked out of the Hillel building when Kahane showed up uninvited two years ago. That's also why the Institute of Politics erred by inviting to campus David Duke, a former KKK wizard and no less a bigot than Jeffries.