THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

So I will.

A couple of years ago in a Philadelphia suburb, a teenage boy was being beaten to death. One after another, people called in increasingly desperate please for help. The emergency operators, all of them black, said they would call it in, and they didn't.

I'm sure this was not the only time this happened. But it is the only time non-white behavior was reported nationally as a disgrace. Recordings of call after call after call were replayed, and the emergency operator, in every case, was irritated at being bothered. Finally a couple of them were fired. The only regret any one of them ever expressed was one who pointed out that he was being fired right at Christmas. He was very sorry for himself.

I have heard nothing like this since. I am willing to bet that the reporters who made this a national sensation caught hell for it. They couldn't be stopped while it was going on, but as I say, it won't happen again, now that the NAACP and the General Powells have weighed in on it behind the scenes.

Affirmative action means putting in affirmative actors. Affirmative actors are people who are paid to act like they are qualified. This would be merely harmful if everybody admitted that it was a silly game. Then all the incompetents would be isolated in some harmless areas, and the quotas would be filled. But preventing such token measures is exactly what militant liberalism is all about. Nobody who wants to be called a respectable conservative would dare speak this truth.

So every time the space program has a major catastrophe, what occurs to me is to wonder exactly who was the affirmative actor in this enormously complex project, where any slip kills. It can be an affirmative actor anywhere along the line. It can be a pipefitting project handled by a major contractor which was one of the sublets to an affirmative actor firm.

I am not saying this is the case most or even much of the time.

My point is that no one but an Unspeakable Person like me would dare to mention this possibility. And the space program is certainly not the only complicated, interrelated, and dangerous enterprise in our society. Every day more and more lives depend on more and more complexity.

The next time you get on a jet plane, try to feel good about affirmative action. While you're sitting waiting to take off, have some fun trying to imagine where, in all those complicated and interrelated parts, the affirmative acting took place this time.

And the simple fact we all know, and no one dares mention, is that life and death make no difference whatsoever in this equation. Those who die at the hands of affirmative actors are never discussed and will never be counted.