IT'S BEEN THE ISSUE for the Class of '93, ROTC, Colin Powell, Leonard Jeffries, the Women's Street Theater Project and the Coalition for Diversity all fall under the umbrella of identity politics--the push for the recognition and protection, in the curriculum and in student life, of differences in race, gender, religion and sexual orientation.

You can quantify the explosion of interest by counting the number of new magazines that have made their way onto the racks of house distribution centers.

But the emergence of such magazines as Yisei (Korean-American), HQ (gay, lesbian and bisexual), the rag (feminist) and Point of Reference (Greek-American) forms only part of identity politics. Rallies and angry letters form some of the other salvos.

Maybe those salvos have found an audience outside the group of activists and student journalists who pay the most attention. Christopher B. Geary '93, who has never joined any group active in identity politics, says he has grown more aware of minority issues.

When Thomson Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53 linked grade inflation to the size of the College's Black student population, for example, Geary didn't brush the statement off. "Even if you don't give it any credence, you think about it more than you would have.

Or maybe the rallies and letters haven't really changed anything outside the activist circles of the class of '93. Caley M. Castelein '93 and Geary, both white males, see identity politics in the abstract. "I think people talk about it more, but I don't know anyone who's been to the rallies," Castelein says.

After Geary thinks for a moment about the ways in which identity politics has changed his life, he finally declares, "I'm not affected."

And while Michael D. Lewis '93, who is Black, asserts that inevitably "being a minority is part of [minority students'] Harvard experience," not every Black, gay, Asian, female or Islamic student becomes active in "minority" issues. Tae-Hui Kim '93, who expresses her ethnic identity through the arts group Kutguhri and the magazine Yisei, says of her Korean friends, "a lot of them don't have the same concerns as I do. Sometimes I feel like I'm one of the only people who feels this way."

The simple truth is that many members of the Class of '93 have kept out of these debates, and the stillness of the water under the tumult suggests that identity politics is only a passing phase.

I BARELY NEEDED to define the term when I spoke with Geary, Castelein and others. No monolith, identity politics encompasses a range of goals and individual controversies, but the class of '93 has inhabited a Harvard convulsive enough over race, gender and sexuality that its members can recognize the fits of this type of controversy from a mile away.

"Southern pride" clashed with condemnation of the Civil War-era South's treatment of Blacks when two springs ago Bridget A. Kerrigan '91 hung a Confederate flag in her window. The protests that ensued made national news, and in a book that ensued made national news, and in a book that appeared last summer syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff painted Kerrigan as a martyr of political correctness.

Other eruptions have occurred. In November 1991, the staff of the conservative journal Peninsula angered gays and their supporters with a 56-page indictment of homosexuality. Last March, Asian students protested when Junior Parents Weekend organizers initially left Asian-American speakers off three race-relations panels.

These matters have little to do with the University's traditional disciplines--except as sociological and political phenomena--yet it is not surprising that they should emerge with such fervor on college campuses.

Many students from Suburban High School or the Piddlesworth Academy face heterogeneity for the first time at Harvard. Freed from whitewashing influences, they begin to examine how innate characteristics affect their intellectual development and their everyday lives.

"I never really thought of [ethnic background] as an issue until I got here," says Muneer I. Ahmad '93, former co-president of the South Asian Association.

Cultural organizations, urban surroundings and curricular variety make Harvard in particular a crucible of identity politics. Kim "hadn't been able to articulate" her Koreanness in high school. Yet in the last four years, Kim solidified her ethnic identity through Kutguhri, Yisei and contact with Koreans in Boston. And a Divinity School class, "Toward an Asian Feminist Theology of Culture," has fed her growing interest in women's issues.