In two New York Times columns, John McWhorter took aim at the University of Wisconsin, first for removing a really big rock because somebody once called it a racial slur 100 years ago, and second for removing the name of Frederic March, a “treasured alum,” because he was briefly part of a campus club which shared a bad name with an national group with which it had no association.
McWhorter’s basic position is that these were both empty, pointless gestures based on the most tenuous of connections that reflect the misguided lost cause of the woke. It’s neither about the removal of a rock or the changing of a name, expense of removal and offense to the memory of a distinguished alumnus aside. It’s about the misguided inferential leaps and the feigned claims of suffering manufactured by children seeking things to be outraged about. When real problems run dry, they move on to the trivial, and ultimately the non-existent.
Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rebecca Blank, wrote a Letter to the Editor to respond, which would be entirely understandable and appropriate since she’s the putative adult at the college and these two empty gestures happened on her watch. But she notably felt compelled to include that she wasn’t writing for herself, as if she owned these moves, but “in collaboration with student leaders from the Wisconsin Black Student Union and Union Council to tell you what actually occurred.”
Whether this was to diffuse blame or to pander to the students, as if kids who will be there for a hot minute get to reinvent a university according to the latest fashion trend in hemlines is unclear. What is clear is that nothing she has to say related to “what actually occurred,” as opposed to the chaos theory inferential leaps crafted to create an evil rock and a name on a building that made students pretend to cry.
Like campuses across the country, we are wrestling with named places and objects that have imperfect and racist histories, while also striving to create an environment that makes students, faculty and staff feel that they belong.
Excuse 1: Others are doing stupid crap so we are too.
Who and what are given prominence on campus carry meaning and reflect what values we wish to endorse. These are choices. We sought to question whether those choices — if revisited today — reflect our values.
Excuse 2: Nothing in the past, no fact, tradition, honor, reality, matters if there is anything inconsistent with the “values” of the moment, values being defined as anything that can be pointed at and someone goes “ugh” or “I feel unsafe.”
There are some things in our country’s history that are so toxic that you can never erase the stain, let alone merit a named space in our student union. Membership in a group with a name like that of the K.K.K. is one of them.
Excuse 3: If it sounds like something bad, it is bad, and it is so bad that it’s as bad as the thing it sounds like because sounds are “so toxic that you can never erase the stain.”
For a student, even an academic, to believe that this reflects what “actually happened” as opposed to flights of delusional connections that only the most fertile imaginations can take seriously, is one thing. But Blank is the Chancellor of the University. She is supposed to be there after the kids graduate. She is the guardian of the University against transitory childish beliefs and actions. She’s the person who is paid to say no when the kids stamp their feet.
A rock that was associated with a vile racial slur in the 1920s was also removed from our main campus, at the request of the Wisconsin Black Student Union and other groups. We came to this conclusion after more than a year of consultation and discussion, sparked by the death of George Floyd.
The rock didn’t kill George Floyd. The rock didn’t hurt anyone. The rock is just a rock. A big rock. A cool rock. But just a rock. That some racist characterized it with a racist slur isn’t the rock’s fault. It’s a rock. Condemn the racist and racial slur used one time in an obscure writing that likely required some serious effort to unearth because that’s who committed the offense. Write about the rock in glowing racial terms if you feel the need to rehabilitate the rock as a non-racist rock, even though rocks can’t be racist because they’re rocks. But what sort of idiot blames the rock?
In 2018, the university removed the name of Fredric March, the actor and an alumnus, from a student performance space at the request of students, and after months of discussion about the subject among our student leaders. It did so after the terrible events of Charlottesville and historical research showing incontrovertibly that March was a member of a campus group called the Ku Klux Klan, though the group was not affiliated in any way with the national Knights of the K.K.K.
While it is good that March went on to become a fighter for civil rights and equality, the fact remains that while a student here he aligned himself with a student group that echoed the K.K.K. name.
Frederic March wasn’t at Charlottesville for two reasons. First, because he was a dedicated “fighter for civil rights and equality” and second because he died in 1975. On the one side, you have not only one of our greatest actor who graduated from the university, who was dedicated to the wonderful cause of equality. On the other side, he was a member of a campus club with the same name, but not at all connected, to a notorious violent racist organization.
Typical rhetoric was statements like this from one Madison student: “I cannot believe that my friends and I have been performing in a space named after someone who would have considered all of us to be lesser beings.” She added, “I find it so ironic that we are sharing our intersectional stories in a theater that honors a racist.”
Except the chancellor commissioned a report which concluded that the only “connection” was the name, and that otherwise the two were entirely separate and unrelated. An adult might have viewed this as a teachable moment about making unwarranted and baseless inferential leaps. Or perhaps explained that even if March’s membership in a college club was wrong, he overcame that by the rest of his life as a fighter for civil rights. Maybe even argued that if the name offended students, blame the name and not the person, because March didn’t choose the similar name and never put on a white hood, as he now existed in the students’ passionate mind’s eye.
Blank, however, did none of these things. Instead, she rubbed the tummies of the outraged matriculants of the moment and begged them not to torch her office for being complicit in rock racism by not enabling the dismantling of the rock. In a way, Blank did tell us what “actually happened.” The adult responsible failed to explain to the insipid children how their tenuous connections are silly and why they don’t really hurt anyone. Instead, Blank wrote a letter to the NYT
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