A rock is canceled in Wisconsin

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According to the Book of Genesis, God flooded the world not only because human beings were corrupt but also because, through their evil, “the earth was corrupt.” Modern readers are often perplexed by the idea that human evil stains non-human things. But the University of Wisconsin, Madison gets it. That metaphysical awareness helps explain why they just spent $50,000 to remove a corrupt boulder from its campus.

When the boulder was put on display in 1925, it was referred to by a name that contained the n-word, a name “commonly used at the time to refer to any large, dark rock.” As the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia explains, this same term was used to describe a brand of oysters, a kind of overcoat, a mountain, and many other things and places

According to some accounts, area residents referred to the rock by the same “disruptive” name for some time. But the only reference history has left us is a cheerful article explaining that the boulder, formerly only “partly visible,” was “now out where folks can look at it.” The offensive term is placed in quotation marks. According to the New York Post, “university historians have not found any other time that the term was used” to refer to the boulder. In any case, it has been known as Chamberlin Rock, after a 19th-century geologist and University of Wisconsin president with no bigotry on his record, for over 90 years.

The activists who demanded the removal of Chamberlin Rock last summer consider it a symbol of “ongoing harm.” Nalah McWhorter, president of the Wisconsin Black Student Union, called it “a constant reminder of the injustices we face, not only on this campus but in society as a whole.” It’s “another example and another symbol that we don’t belong here.”

On the reasoning behind the decision to remove Chamberlin Rock, renaming isn’t enough. Once an object has been touched, even incidentally, by race prejudice, renaming cannot wipe out the stain or the danger to passers-by.

That’s the reasoning endorsed not only by student activists but also by Chancellor Rebecca Blank, who promised to have the boulder moved in January. The Campus Planning Committee subsequently voted unanimously in favor of removal. To read the minutes of the meeting at which the vote was taken is to be awestruck by the way in which nearly everyone present endorses this strained logic.

One historian admitted that exactly one newspaper clipping suggested even a tenuous connection between Chamberlin Rock and racism. And yet, excising the rock from campus was “an opportunity to ‘prioritize students of color.’” Another administrator said that the “rock interferes with equal educational opportunity for all.” Exactly one brave soul, mercifully unaffiliated with the university, gently observed that, while the “name is offensive and undeniably inappropriate,” it was also last used almost a century ago and has nothing to do with racism in the present.

But what kind of a lesson is it for students when administrators and faculty not only accede to their unreasonable demands but also pretend to adopt their arguments? At least, one hopes they’re pretending.

Chamberlin Rock, reputed to be over two billion years old, now sits at a remote site. It has seen a lot, but maybe nothing like this.

I guess the point of the article is to trigger conservatives but this is so absurd all I am able to do is laugh and feel grateful I am not a Wisconsin taxpayer and had the luck to not be born at a time where I would be a student today.

[...] the article doesnt explain how the boulder got it's race related name. Its a rather light colored rock. Looks Caucasian to me!