Removing the rock of faux outrages

Until the next unreasonable demand.

Is it just me? Is Blaska the outlier? Is your irascible bloggeur the only one in high dudgeon today? (Wouldn’t be the first time.) Anyone else think the removal of a glacial erratic boulder from the campus of the University of Wisconsin is the most stupid, egregious display of Woke virtue signaling ever? (Need more adjectives and adverbs, STAT!) Please tell me I’m not going crazy.

Neither the Babylon Bee nor the Onion can make this stuff up. It is its own parody. A 42-ton boulder — not fashioned into a likeness of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest or Donald Trump — tumbled up on the Madison isthmus by the same impersonal glacier that formed Madison’s chain of lakes 12,000 years ago. Somehow, THIS is your symbol of white oppression? 

Why? Because someone 100 years ago used a racial pejorative to refer, generically, to big rocks like the Chamberlin Rock. A term that, guaranteed, not one of the campus’ 40,000 cosseted students has ever heard in their young lives. That was only discovered in a mouldering issue of a 1925 newspaper. “University historians have not found any other time that the slur was used,that newspaper helpfully informs today.

Chamberlin Rock
Is no one damning its removal?

Through some bizarre progressive alchemy, the rock, named after a long-ago university president, has become a “painful symbol of the university’s racist past.” Notice the absence of the qualifying adverb “allegedly.” For it is given that the University of Wisconsin-Madison was racist and today, with its removal, likely is only a little bit less so. Because a noisy claque of social justice warriors is on the prowl. On a campus where young men once mustered out of Camp Randall on these very grounds to fight slavery and secession in the South. Now THAT is skin in the game, unlike the grievance studies majors playing little Miss Snowflake.

No baseball bat and bullhorn needed when playing the race card in Madison WI. Over-educated college deans, salaries well into six figures, will bow and scrape like reverse Stepin Fetchits. No history, either.


Loud and stupid is no way to go through life, kids.


‘Further harm’?

Campus chancellor Rebecca Blank couldn’t muster the spine to say, “Hey Kids, we’ll get back to you on that. If you want to stomp and shout over a big blank stone instead of making a difference in the world, I’ll sell the popcorn.” No, instead, we get this mealy mouthed subservience to stupidity: 

“Removing the rock as a monument in a prominent location prevents further harm to our community while preserving the rock’s educational research value for our current and future students.”

That is the WI State Journal quoting the university’s director of campus planning and landscape architecture, who appears to be as white as a loaf of Wonder Bread. And as clueless.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: The Werkes hopes that some future generation will look at the rock in its new, undisclosed location and ask “What were they thinking back in 2021?” Now THERE would be some educational research value.

What will be the next Madison artifact to go?

About David Blaska

Madison WI
This entry was posted in Critical Race Theory / Identity politics, Progressives, Race, Uncategorized and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

53 Responses to Removing the rock of faux outrages

  1. Mordecai The Red says:

    This is no longer about achieving racial justice, and I’m no longer sure it ever was. This is about a small, loud group of hyper-sensitive children weaponizing race to impose their will on the adults. Glad I’ve long since left the universities; these groups were ridiculous then and they’re over the top now.

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