“Go Back to Africa!” the marchers chanted, shaking their torches. “Go Back to Africa!” their signs declared.
One small detail they overlooked. Black Americans’ ancestors hadn’t exactly come on tourist visas. It was not a “choice” (contrary to what Kanye said). Yet nevertheless, “Go Back to Africa!” the marchers intoned.
The next morning they awoke to find their wish granted! Black Americans had overnight all decamped to Africa.
It wasn’t reported in the newspaper. In fact, the first sign of something amiss was the paper not found on people’s porches that morning. Then they noticed the trash hadn’t been collected. To find out what the heck was going on, they turned on their smartphones, TVs, and radios, but none of those were functioning as normal either. So they went over to the local diner hoping their neighbors might have some information. But the diner wasn’t open. Nor was mail delivered that day.
All of it of course because the Blacks had gone back to Africa. All those who used to work to produce the daily paper, now gone. And the ones who’d worked on the garbage trucks. All those internet workers too; the TV and radio folks; the staff at the diner; the postal system personnel. And so many more, in every part of society. All those Black people who toil every day to make it function. All gone.
It quickly got worse. Much worse. Some bright bulbs thought they’d better head right over to the supermarket, to stock up on groceries and other necessities. Well, guess what.
Mad Max time.
Very soon another march was organized. This time without torches, and the chants were desperate: “PLEASE come back from Africa!”
But the Blacks couldn’t hear them from so far away.
The Rational Optimist 
January 3, 2023 at 6:40 pm
Check the history. At least 50% of Blacks paid their own way to the America and wanted to come. True fact!
January 3, 2023 at 8:36 pm
Ridiculously and foolishly untrue. The overwhelming majority of American Blacks had ancestors who were brought here as slaves; the percentage has been estimated between 80 and 95%. Note that almost all also had some white ancestors — mostly slave owners who impregnated their slaves both to create more property and for sexual gratification. Also, while it is true that, after 1865, a certain number of Black people did voluntarily immigrate to America, a lot of those people — especially the many from Jamaica, Haiti, and other Caribbean locations — had ancestors who were originally taken from Africa as slaves. So there are rather few American Blacks whose ancestors included no slaves.
January 4, 2023 at 11:38 am
I’d love to see Doug’s source for his assertion. I love meaningless statements like “check the history.” Please, Doug, enlighten us!
The question, of course, is, where in Africa would I go? Nigeria, Congo, Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal? Actually, as a percentage, I should probably go back to Ireland.
January 4, 2023 at 11:45 am
It’s pretty simple. We are not royalty who have inherited god-given power through patrilineal descent or some other nonsense. Regardless of our ancestry, we are born equal citizens. We each have full rights to thrive here.
January 4, 2023 at 7:57 pm
No one is as made in America as we are.— Martin Luther King. I live only twenty miles from where Frederick Douglas,who is one of the greatest heroes our country has produced was born and lived out much of his youth as a slave. The overwhelming majority of black people in this country are descended from Africans who survived the horrors of the middle passage and the brutality of slavery. A recent book I recommend on this subject is Edward Baptist”The half has never been told”. In short,the old south was not the pretty swirl of crinolines depicted in Gone with the wind. (And Margaret Mitchell’s depiction of reconstruction and the people who attempted it as ‘carpetbaggers’ is ahistorical and deeply offensive.No one revels in self-pity more than southern apologist.
January 4, 2023 at 8:40 pm
The Edward Baptist book I reviewed at the Albany Library in 2015. And posted a recap of the review on this blog:https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/slavery-and-american-capitalism/