"The traditional liberal bourgeoisintegrationist viewpoint is very readily availableto Harvard students," Ali says. "We also wanted tolook at the other ideas that have been part of theBlack freedom struggle."

The BSA does not necessarily represent theviews of all of Harvard's Black students, Alisays, and to assume that it does would be toassume that Black students are somehow separatefrom the Harvard community as a whole.

"If you see Harvard as an integrated school, asone where Black students are interacting withother students, the BSA is only part of the largerpicture," Ali says, adding that the BSA can onlybe seen as representing all of Harvard's Blackcommunity "if you see Black students as aghettoized, segregated people who are notinteracting with the rest of the University."

Ali says the members of the BSA are united notby a common culture or common background, but bytheir common identity as Harvard students.

"What the BSA is doing is not the entire Blackexperience--it's also going to theclassroom...going to the same dining hall, eatingthe same food, attending a lot of the same socialevents," Ali says. "We were students at Harvardbefore we could be in the Black StudentsAssociation."

There are also those who criticize the BSA fortrying to tackle political issues at all. JeffreyB. Ferguson '85, who wrote his senior thesis onthe BSA at Harvard, says the notion of"difference" that underlies the BSA's agenda isnothing more than a "surface level difference."

"When they get into the substance of their ownBlackness, there's not much there," Ferguson says."They are not much different from the otherstudents in the university in how they think, howthey talk, what they wear."

Ferguson, who says he's "pretty impatient" withthe BSA, describes the organization as "ventingover nonsense."

"It's hard to make a decision to join anorganization that has nothing to go for it exceptskin color," Ferguson says. When it comes topolitics, Ferguson says the BSA tends to"piggyback" on national issues.

The solution to the problem of politics,according to Ferguson, is to avoid making the BSAinto a "race watchdog organization" and instead"pick a concrete goal," such as raising the gradepoint average of BSA members or to encourage Blackstudents to "take over" existing newspapers suchas The Crimson and the Independent rather thancreating their own publications.

"That way race issues get covered quite a lot,"Ferguson says