If it were some practical joke devised by a bunch of bored geeks on 4-chan, say like creating the unbearably nonsensical belief that the ubiquitous “OK” hand signal used by pretty much everyone was a secret “white supremacist” sign, it would have been spectacular. It was that dumb.
The University of Wisconsin removed a 42-ton boulder from its Madison campus Friday after complaints from students of color who called the rock a symbol of racism.
It was a rock. A 42-ton rock, but still a rock.
The rock is a rare, large example of a pre-Cambrian era glacial erratic, likely over two billion years old. It had been designated as a monument on campus in honor of Thomas Chamberlin, a noted geologist who also served as president of the University of Wisconsin from 1887 to 1892.
So what was it about this rock that made the Black Student Union demand its removal?
A 1925 Wisconsin State Journal article used the n-word as part of a nickname for the giant boulder.
And one jerk’s off-hand characterization nearly 100 years ago turned this rock into something that harmed students today? How anyone even knew it happened is shocking. Did the students really spend their free time reading 1925 Wisconsin State Journal articles just in case a racist word was uttered? Even so, what was it about the rock that hurt them so much it compelled its $50,000 removal?
The Wisconsin Black Student Union last summer called for the rock to be removed from campus as one of a series of demands it said were aimed at seeking justice for Black students. The campaign came in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the union said in a statement posted on Instagram Friday.
“It was very meaningful for me to be there and to see the process all the way through to the end,” senior Nalah McWhorter said in a university news release. McWhorter, who was the president of the Wisconsin Black Student Union for the past academic year, was there when the boulder was removed Friday.
The rock didn’t kill George Floyd or Breonna Taylor. The rock didn’t kill anyone. Because it’s a rock, for crying out loud. But when you have to invent ridiculous targets because you world is so devoid of any serious racism that you go after a rock, and you do so only because of one word that has nothing to do with the rock, this is what you end up with. With the gushing praise of the University of Wisconsin administration for your bravery and boldness in going after a rock.
“It took courage and commitment for the Wisconsin Black Student Union to bring this issue forward and to influence change alongside UW’s Wunk Sheek student leaders,” said Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Lori Reesor. “In the midst of demands for justice following George Floyd’s murder last summer, the students wanted change on campus and they worked hard to see this through. While the decision required compromise, I’m proud of the student leaders and the collaboration it took to get here.”
John McWhorter says aloud what any rational person is thinking.
The students are fashioning their take on the rock as a kind of sophistication or higher awareness. But what they are really demanding is that we all dumb ourselves down.
The cry of the students is that the rock wasn’t just a rock, but a symbol of racism because of the one word used by some rando in 1925 that was never associated with the rock again.
The idea, it would seem, is that there is no difference between the past and the present, that what some writer said one day during the Coolidge administration would be hurtful to a student walking past the rock while texting last month, that this rock is representative of racism in the same way that a Confederate statue is representative of Southern racism.
So apparently the passage of time is an illusion? That’s sophisticated indeed as a literary conceit, but what’s deep in Faulkner becomes mere performance when it’s wielded to have a rock lifted away because of what one person called it almost a century ago.
Did a rock actually cause anyone to suffer?
If the presence of that rock actually makes some people desperately uncomfortable, they need counseling. And as such, we can be quite sure that these students were acting. Few can miss that there is a performative aspect in the claim that college campuses, perhaps the most diligently antiracism spaces on the planet, are seething with bigotry. The Wisconsin rock episode was a textbook demonstration of the difference between sincere activism and playacting, out of a desire to join the civil rights struggle in a time when the problems are so much more abstract than they once were.
But as McWhorter points out, this is a time when any complaint of racism by any black person must be taken with the utmost seriousness at the peril of being decried as racist. No matter how ridiculous or performative the nonsense may be. If a black person claims hurt, then hurt it must be.
I know — you thought, based on what people of a certain charisma are telling you, that the idea is that where race or racism is concerned, Black people are always right. What matters is not what someone meant, but how the (Black) person says he or she feels about it. Anything less is blaming the victim.
McWhorter can say this because he’s now a New York Times columnist, a Columbia linguistics professor and, well, black. Sometimes, the things black people demand are just dumb, and its neither woke nor anti-racist to acquiesce to dumb crap like removing a rock under some misguided vision of wokiosity that black people are always right when they claim to feel something.
Right. All of us, on some level, know that this is nonsense, and readers who think I am making this point only to white people are quite mistaken. I mean all of us. Neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor redlining renders a people’s judgment of where racism has reared its head infallible.
Want to not be racist? Then accept the premise that people of any race or gender can do stupid, ridiculous, even crazy stuff, and don’t let them get away with it just because of their skin or genitalia. Real equality means that when someone demands something monumentally idiotic, like removing a 42-ton rock, you say “no.” And if that’s the worst racist thing they can manufacture, be happy that their lives are so wonderfully free of racism that they can’t come up with anything more serious to cry about than a rock.
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In 1978 Wisconsin Gov. Lee Dreyfuss mocked Madison as “30 square miles surrounded by reality.” Thirty-five years later, Mayor-For-Life Paul Soglin (an NYC transplant who couldn’t leave the high-quality weed vendors here after his matriculation at UW) actually proposed the City adopt that jab as its motto (enlarged to “77 square miles etc”). UW as an institution regularly sets the latest woke trend, which trends fund such geological inanity. The only thing shocking, here, about this rock’s removal was how long it took. But truly, the subtext ought to be that this craziness has overtaken much of what used to be the surrounding reality. That is where we are now.
From this, it seems fairly safe to conclude there is no real racism in Wisconsin. /s
Too many McWhorters!
Right?
Uh, “counseling”? What would Loretta Castorini do?
The solution!
…fixing the world, one rock at a time.
I remember when people made fun of a Nigerian village because their police had to arrest a goat under suspicion of “armed robbery”. Words are spells, you see. The goat was in fact a magician who can turn himself into goats. “Ignorant and uneducated! haha!” They said. But we are now the laughingstock of the Nigerian village: “They think they can turn a rock into a KKK Grand Cyclops using that spell!, that’s not how magic works!”. In their defense, the Nigerian police said they had no choice but to appease the mob. This University is not even blushing.
The woke…undoing hundreds of years of what little progress there has been in the name of progress.
I wouldn’t call Nigerian villagers woke. But it would be sad to see people like the author of this article going to the courtroom to defend goats and rocks against “hate crimes” charges and whatnot. This poor innocent rock was sentenced to exile. Yes, we can split the atom but we are now nearly powerless to defend the reputation of a rock. Embrace.
R.I.P., Charlie.
RIP, Charlie.
“The students are fashioning their take on the rock as a kind of sophistication or higher awareness. But what they are really demanding is that we all dumb ourselves down.”
A friend of mine recently coined a word for this sort of “thinking”. She refers to it as “instupidation”.
“What matters is not what someone meant, but how the (Black) person says he or she feels about it.”
The notion that inference outweighs intent… is truly frightening, as the implication is that someone else better knows what you’re thinking than you do. Another example of instupidation.
“Sticks and stones. . .,” right?
There are probably some racist trees that need to come down too.
There are a number of entire mountain peaks that need to come down. Reclaiming is apparently not an option for geologic formations.
“So apparently the passage of time is an illusion?”
The wokesters may be ahead of us here. It has been well-known for centuries by those who study such things, that time and space are an illusion, and this was confirmed in the early 1900’s by physicists. See the Upanishads or the Vedas, or google “Double-slit experiment.”
Do you ever ask yourself before commenting, “Even if I can, should I?”
I know this seems off-topic, but it actually gets at the fundamental difference between the woke and the rest of which leads them into self-parody. Sensible people learn in college physics or philosophy about the illusory nature of reality, and realize that the obvious solution is to abandon fear and live life to the fullest. The woke respond by retreating into an alternate reality of nihilism, hatred and fear, constructed for them by post-modernists, and then stamping their little feet and insisting that the rest of us join them there.
I trust you to know what should be posted and what shouldn’t. I do feel sad when one of my posts is rejected, but that’s not your problem.
Maybe I give you more latitude than I should.
Typical white supremacy. Divert funds from equity programs to ameliorate guilt in white administrators, line the pockets of white-owned businesses and give paychecks to the white workers in the photo. Plus who knows if they disposed of this rock responsibly where it can do no more harm.
What’s more racist…having white people remove the rock or black people do it?
Maybe the answer is to have the white people pay the black people for the privilege of removing it.
SHG,
One must admit that it is a big rock. It weighs 42 tons. That is, how shall I say it, important. But, admittedly, I don’t know why.
Small pebbles upon which tribal members (and perhaps blacks and whites) skipped across lakes or hurled at each other in play (and sometimes in mooten hot anger) are not important. They are just pebbles but I am not sure why either.
All the best.
RGK
If you chip a big rock, does it not bleed?
“you cannot get blood from a stone”
“It weighs 42 tons. That is, how shall I say it, important.”
Was Douglas Adams a prophet or what.
Certain words in this piece stand out to me, ridiculous, crazy, nonsense. In the spirit of those words I suggested to a friend weeks ago when the rock was removed that it should be left in place.
The offended students or anyone could attack the rock. They could strike it,Kick it, fight it formally with boxing gloves. I know it’s juvenile but seems right to me.
“Gary Brown, director of campus planning and landscape architecture, shepherded the search for the rock’s new home. “Moving the rock to this remote site prevents further harm to our community while preserving the rock’s educational and research value for current and future scholars,” Brown said in a news release.”
$50,000 to move educational and research value off campus?
That seems to be the modern trend. One must avoid the campus at all costs to actually learn anything.
FWIW the Wunk Sheek student leaders were involved because the boulder sat within the area of a Native American burial mound.
So the rock was called a pejorative once* and the solution is to … remove the rock?
* And “once” really means “once”: “University historians have not found any other time that the term was used but said the Ku Klux Klan** was active on campus at that time.”
** So the Wisconsin State Journal’s response to how this phrase found its way into the archives is that the KKK must’ve made them do it?
The real thing wrong here? $50,000 to move a large rock? Did the rock have a lawyer?
they couldn’t even move it themselves