A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life project suggests this might be so. Though blacks lag behind Asians, whites and Latinos in online access, they are gaining fast: 36 per-cent now surf the Web, compared with 23 percent two years ago. (Half of whites are online.) The study also reveals that African-Americans are doing more online than other ethnic groups. They are more likely to use the Net when seeking a job, a place to live, or religious information. And they use their computer for fun - to download music, watch video clips, play games, and so forth. That doesn't surprise Omar Wasow, executive di-rector of BlackPlanet.com a site aimed at Afri-can-Americans launched more than a year ago. "While the digital divide has been the dominant story about black people and the Web, there's anoth-er important story which is that African-Americans have been early adopters and innovators with these technologies as well," Wasow said.

   Wasow thinks African-Americans have gotten the message that the Web can be an engine of opportuni-ty. "The reason you would see people using everying from job search engines to loan applications is that all those things are especially useful if you don't come to the table with a lot of power and privilege and net-works," he said.

Renee McClure, national head of the Black Data Processing Association (www.bdpa.org), a nonprofit group that provides re-sources for African-Americans, recently gave an address with the theme "windows of opportuni-ty.' "We're pushing it," said Mc-Clure, a Westbury native who lives in Queens and works as a senior software engineer for KeySpan. "To survive, you have to be Internet savvy."

   Does race matter in cyber-space? "I think in terms of mainstream commercial transactions, the Internet is a colorblind society," said Wasow. "You can go on and be judged by the con-tent of your data, not the color of your skin."

   At the same time, a growing number of sites are building Internet communities of color. A search of www.everythingblack.com, for example, brings up hun-dreds of sites aimed at African-Americans. Among the more well-known are www.netnoir.com, www.bet.com, www.blackenterpise.com, and www.blackvoices.com, (owned by the Tribune Co., which also owns this newspaper.)

BlackPlanet is owned by Community Connect, a company that maintains a roster of ethnic-oriented sites. It stands out because its users supply much of its content. Members are urged to create personal pages and to use the site's e-mail, message boards, in-stant messaging and chat. "A lot of our competitors were producing something that was more like televi-sion, and we wanted to do something that was more like the telephone." Wasow said. "There's no content more dynamic than another person.

   In fact, there was a provocative debate in Black-Planet's forum when I visited recently. Though the site is open to people of all races, and Wasow esti-mates about 10 percent of BP's members are non-black, there has apparently been enough friction to generate this question: "Is there racism on BP?" Judging from the more than 200 responses post-ed - some of which championed the rights of non-blacks to use the site, others which argued that BlackPlanet should be exclusively for African-Ameri-cans - getting along online can be as complex as it is in the real world.