Rock of Ages

If it was 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 any more serious to cry about than a rock.