The Lingering Effects of Slavery

Subscribe to future audio versions of AmRen articles here.

I keep hearing blacks say we need an open and honest conversation about race, and oppression — and the lingering effects of slavery. Well, I guess. I’ve sort of thought that, too. Of course, I could guess who wants to do all the talking. But I have to concede that slavery does have lingering effects and, yes, that they are ghastly. Because of this legacy, I am very sorry about slavery.

So, let’s talk about the lingering effects of slavery. For starters, Americans can’t walk in the cities of their own country without danger of being beaten to death or shot. How is that for a lingering effect? The downtowns of their cities are uninhabitable: New York, Camden, Trenton, Newark, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Jackson, New Orleans, for example. I am filled with repentance for slavery. Boy, am I.

Sometimes I wish we had time travel so we could go back and hang those wretched Brits who brought in slaves. Places that I once loved — San Francisco, for example — are dying, have died, are under uncontrolled crime by a people at the level of hunting and gathering, or have stores that are moving out along with the civilized who are able to escape. In one after another once-lovely cities, American-African mayoresses make crime virtually legal. The lingering effects of slavery. Believe me, I am sorry.

LEOFSs are everywhere, and white people ought to admit their responsibility. My grandsons go to schools staffed by Lingering Effects at the mental level of tarsiers, who lack all respect for grammar, mathematics, or recognizable English. Dat stuff be Ray Ciss, know wud I’m sane? Our kids aren’t offered AP courses because the LEOFSs can’t pass them. I guess if my granddaughter wants to learn chemistry, she can do it late at night, in the basement, with curtains over the windows, with her mother keeping watch.

Our American Africans endlessly advert to their problems caused by slavery and how whites need to solve them. Hey, I have a brilliant answer for them: Why don’t you solve your own problems? Let’s start with murder. Every year in Chicago, some 700 lingering effects of slavery get shot to death by other lingering effects of slavery; 300 in Baltimore, 500 in Philadelphia, and 200 in Washington. In addition, at least twice as many are shot but survive. I offer our selvatico citizens a solution: Stop shooting each other.

Whites aren’t shooting you, despite the occasional temptation. You are shooting yourselves. Why is it my problem?

I here offer another brilliant solution to a black problem. Blacks do terribly on the SATs. They don’t do poorly because of oppression. They don’t do poorly because of the lingering effects of slavery. They are the lingering effects. They do poorly because they don’t know the answers. My astute and uniquely insightful suggestion: Try studying.

Bet you didn’t think of that. Try books, those square things with the flappy parts inside. I can’t do it for you. Anyway, why is it my problem?

Okay. Illegitimacy among American Africans is at 70 or 80 percent. Lots of black kids spring from unmarried 13-year-olds and grow up as messes because they don’t have parenting. Here is another luminously brilliant solution that I bet you haven’t thought of: Tell your 13-year-olds to keep their legs crossed.

Yes, they would have to sort of hop instead of walking, but social improvement would justify it. Thing is, blacks have to do this for themselves. Whites can’t cross their legs for them.

Further, lingering effects are fire hazards. Every few years a city burns, though recently the arson has gone wholesale. I suppose efficiency grows with practice.

Looting and rioting broke out on April 27, 2015, at North and Pennsylvania Avenues in Baltimore where a CVS store was set on fire. (Credit Image: © Algerina Perna/Baltimore Sun/TNS via ZUMA Press Wire)

Now, medical schools are dropping entrance exams because of the lingering effects of slavery. Doctors are going to know all about oppression, but probably won’t know where their feet are. Before long, we’ll cure diseases by sacrificing chickens. Meanwhile, if you are wheeled into the OR for brain surgery, you will be wise to have a tag on your big toe saying, “Open other end.” If the surgeon is holding an ice-cream scoop and a pair of pliers, run. While running, you might reflect that AP Biology would have been a good idea. Thing is, a whole raft of lingering effects, some of whom are now professors at Harvard, will tell you that knowing anything is a white-supremacist form of being, and to promote social justice you’ll just have to go with the pliers and ice-cream scoop.

It used to be that we could hire people because they could do the job. It seemed a viable concept. Now (another lingering effect of slavery) we have to hire them because they can’t. It used to be that if your transmission needed fixing, you would find someone who knew how to fix transmissions. This seemed reasonable to those of us raised in the old ways. Now, however, we have to hire someone who can’t do it, and probably can’t find the transmission. It would be like an Easter Egg hunt.

In high school, we had tests to find really smart kids, which usually meant Chinese ones, so they could become scientists and cure cancer, or at least come close enough to make it nervous. Now, because of the lingering effects of slavery, we can’t do that either. We’ll just have to keep on having cancer.

See? We’re having an open and honest conversation about race. Aren’t you happy?

Now, let me get historical a little bit. We’ve all heard, maybe 50,000 times, that Martin Luther King Jr. said he wanted his people to be judged by their character, not the color of their skin. The idea’s pretty good, but I’m tired of hearing it and would almost pay you 20 cents every time you don’t say it. But that’s the problem. Whites and Asians do judge you by the content of your character. If you stopped smacking white folks and pushing Asians in front of subway trains, and stopped killing us and each other and didn’t carry off most everything in our stores, we’d still judge you by the content of your character. But if burning our cities wasn’t part of the content, well, you’d stop being a lingering effect of slavery and just be, you know, people wandering around and scratching and maybe drinking beer, and things would be just lots better all around. It might be something to think about.

There, we’ve had an open and honest conversation. I guess you are happy. And now I’m going to get on Amazon and see whether they have a full-body ballistic vest and an armored bathysphere on wheels, because I have a job interview next week in Washington, and I worry about the lingering effects of slavery.