Now that South Carolina has folded the flag and performed all manner of prescribed unction, let's focus attention on an underserved symbol of blatant racial hostility: fractions.

If indeed flags are powerful symbols, then it follows that mathematic symbols are equally evocative of past oppression at the hands of heartless imperialists.  Many are those who admit to hating math, but in an age of hypersensitive outrage, might there be a future in rooting out hate-math?

Take, for example, the sinister fraction three fifths.  No amount of deft decimal doublespeak can overcome its sinister roots as a fractional code word for less than whole personhood.  Call it 0.60 if you like, but three fifths drips still with the oppressive taint of the pain that particular fraction conjures.  For the same reasons the South Carolina legislature moved against the oppressive symbolism of the Confederate battle flag, thoughtful citizens should ban offensive fractions from public usage because of hurtful connections to a barbaric past. 

Of course, a world without the fraction three fifths would be difficult to navigate.  All calculators and computers must necessarily be fed new lines of code to ensure that no mathematical calculation could ever yield a product of 0.60 or its more shame-ridden expression.  Even the vaunted whole percentage, 60%, teeters on hate speech because it, too, is a thinly veiled attempt at three fifths.  Thomas Sowell's valiant rescue attempt of the fraction three fifths aside, it remains a less than whole number that has done a number on far too many suffering souls.  Time to lock three fifths away in the same dungeon as holds the Confederate battle flag and its NASCAR derivations.

Thus cleansed, it shall fall to the adherents of Common Core curricula to prepare future citizens to live in a world of missing sums.  When, say, in predicting the glide-slope intercept of a falling object along an x-y axis the item mysteriously disappears between 0.59 and 0.61 seconds of flight, students will be taught that blank spaces in math are like black holes in distant space/time.  This same black hole theorem explains why trillions of dollars poured into social uplift programs cannot be means-tested for return on investment.  It's possible, indeed highly probable, that money and results both leaked through the blank space created by removal of three fifths from the lexicon of math symbols.  That said, American culture is spared both a shameful past for which it can never atone and a make-believe future forever freed from real numbers. It is the logical next step in purging our souls.