Zap-- You're White

The Boston School Committee has at long last taken a firm step to cut down the number of racially imbalanced schools in the city. In a unanimous decision last week, the committee boldly voted part of the problem out of existence.

The committee's method--like its thinking on so many aspects of the racial question--was serenely simple. Massachusetts under the state school desegregation law, determines racial imbalance by the percentage of non-whites in a school. The School Committee has now decided to count 671 Chinese students as white. So by the committee's figures, there are 36 imbalanced schools in the city, although state officials, using the now presumably outdated definitions of the U.S. Census Bureau, persist in counting 48.

There is nothing really wrong with the School Committee's facing the old problem in a new way. Humpty-Dumpty did it all the time. "When I use a word," he told Alice, "It means just what I want it to mean, neither more nor less." Of course Alice protested: "The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things." The question is," said the egg, "which is to be master--that's all."

Since the School Committee has now seized the initiative in solving the problem of racial imbalance, it is something of a puzzle why the group didn't throw gradualism to the winds and go all the way. The committee members could, after all, have said that Negroes are whites, and ended racial imbalance in Boston altogether.