Ever since the Commerce Department began focusing on the "digital divide, "the issue has been discussed largely as a racial gap. For good reason: It's undeniable that there's a Net-access chasm between whites and most nonwhite populations.

But race, it turns out, is a poor analytic filter. The category that Commerce calls "Asia/Pacific Islander," for example, while nonwhite, shows significantly higher Net usage than many whites. Also, the differences in Internet access between some subgroups of African Americans are far greater than those between African Americans and whites.

Which prompts some close to the data to say that the digital divide is not a racial divide at all. "I've been looking at these numbers since 1998," says Idil Cakim, an analyst for Cyber Dialogue, a New York Net research firm, "and I've determined that income is the controlling factor for Internet access." According to Cakim's research, there is essentially no digital divide among the wealthiest Americans of any race.

That finding is confirmed by a study released in September 1999 by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonprofit Washington think tank focusing on public policy issues relevant to African Americans. One of the study's most intriguing findings: Among those reporting household incomes of more than $90,000, Internet usage was slightly higher for African Americans than among the general population.

Joint Center research chief Margaret Simms insists: "The African-American community is not monolithic when it comes to being wired to the Internet. "These statistics don't preclude the existence of a Net divide between racial groups. But they demonstrate that where the divide exists, it is vast.

For example, young blacks are a highly wired group. Cakim's research found that a staggering 49 percent of the nearly 5 million African Americans online are between the ages of 18 and 29. The Joint Center discovered that among the very young – ages 18 to 25 – the difference in Internet use between African Americans (64.9 percent) and the general population (74.3 percent) is real, but not massive. Among those aged 65 and over, however, the difference (9.3 percent vs. 17.8 percent) is nearly two to one.

Not surprisingly, the educational divide is also broad. For all Americans, the higher someone's education, the more likely he or she is to be a Netuser. At the highest educational levels, the distance between African Americans and the general population is meaningful, but slight. For those with less than a high-school education, however, the disparity is more than two to one.

Does the data suggest any particular strategy for closing the gap, however one defines it? Perhaps. Studies indicate that African Americans are heavier users of the Internet in public locations – schools, universities and the workplace – than at home. Expanding that access – allowing senior citizens to use Internet stations in schools, or using community development groups to provide Net access – is a key for increasing Net usage among non whites.

Cost and technological familiarity are clearly barriers to home use for all Americans, and that makes one thing clear, Cakim argues: "Reducing the price of access to the Internet is the issue."

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