A RULE OF THUMS: To gauge how ineffectively government is solving a problem, look at how many task forces it has set up to deal with it.

Take Boston's race-relations quandary Gov. Michael S. Dukakis has a special task force with special administrators. He appears on late-night T.V. spots in a playground with an ethnic potpourri of children, speaking of "eracism" in English and Spanish. Mayor Raymond L. Flynn meets with Dukakis and the new Archbishop Bernard F. Law '53 in a highly publicized conference on bringing the city together. The Boston Covenant, formed after a Black student was shot on a Charlestown football field, and the Citywide Parents Council all continue to flail away at the invisible enemy.

Flynn pays nearly a million dollars to the widow of a Black man shot by police in 1975. And he personally chips in to make sure the first Blacks to move into an all white Charlestown housing project are not harmed.

The Boston Globe, not wishing to be left out of the action, recently finishes a 16-month series on Hub racism, which snags a Pulitzer because it is too massive and sprawling not to.

What gives? Obviously, racism is not something one approaches like unemployment or inflation. You can't throw money at racism. You can't solve the problem through tax cuts, defense hikes, or constructing more shelters for the homeless. But Boston is a city on the move, as Kevin White always said with a quivering voice, a city about to become an international center for culture and commerce. Such a city cannot afford the stigma of racism that Boston earned during the mid-seventies' forced busing fracas.

But communities here have been clashing ever since the Irish immigrants challenged Yankee hegemony in this most Protestant of cities. But don't mention that; it could get in the way of plans for Boston's grand future. In the high stakes of development politics, lots of concerned committees and lots of pictures of politicians fraternizing with the locals makes effective p.r.

THIS IS NOT TO IMPUGN the good motives of men like Flynn and Dukakis. Dukakis has always been a positive force in the region on race relations, and Flynn has attacked the problem with a fervor that belongs only to the converted. As one who was a public hindrance to the cause of justice when he opposed forced busing in South Boston 10 years ago, Flynn's recent efforts have the local impact of Richard M. Nixon's voyage to China.

But Flynn's approach as mayor has essentially been public relations--something while couldn't even claim--and it serves to obscure the problem rather than solve it. He draws kudos from The New York Times and The Globe, who are happy to have some good news to report and are rightly trying to encourage the new mayor. But Flynn is attacking the wrong problem, and his approach suggests that he is not confident enough of success to embark on a more comprehensive, long-term plan to improve the city's racial climate.

"Racism" is a facile, loaded term. It looms as a giant, foreboding presence just beyond all the self-affirmation of ethnic pride and encompasses so many shades of though and action as to make it almost meaningless. Is it conscious, a product of ignorance, or merely part of the inertia of tradition? The distinctions are important, especially in Boston.

When Flynn attacks neighborhood racism, for example, he is chasing a ghost, because the tensions at the grass roots level are more often a product of neighborhoods instinctively retreating inward to prevent change than they are of conscious racism per se. The real problem, as The Globe series bluntly showed, is downtown and at places like Harvard, where Blacks have been shunted off toward lower level, lower paying work.

The problem is also papers like The Globe where, according to in-house reporting, only 69 of 2339 employees are Black, high technology and industries and banks, where only 3.6 and 7.8 percent respectively of the employees are Black. It is area colleges whose faculties are 2.2 percent Black, and state government where 6.5 percent of the employees are Black.

Race relations at the neighborhood level and in the job market are two different issues, and Flynn, Dukakis, et al, should approach them as such.

TO FORMULATE an approach to Boston's often tense race relations in neighborhoods such as Charlestown. Southie, Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End, it is important to understand how the current state of affairs came about. During the '50s, when the Black population in Boston was much smaller than its current 20 percent, residents faced few race-related problems, in all likelihood because Blacks had not yet made a serious bid in the job market.

Kevin while, who began his stint in City Hall in 1969, recalled in a recent interview that as late as the '60s Blacks were able to walk through predominantly Irish Catholic South Boston unharassed. "Blacks used to regularly fish of Kelly's landing in South Boston as late as 1968," White says. "What tore the fabric apart was busing, the force and the harshness of its implementation."

Busing, or more precisely the fact that U.S. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity tried as a symbolic gesture to bus Blacks into the most Irish of Boston neighborhoods, Southie, "exacerbated the latent racial tensions that existed in Boston and gave Boston a national stigma," White says.