Just like coffee, women’s hockey, women’s underpants, sand, covid, inviting your relatives and friends to your own funeral, dating a person of colour or not dating a person of colour or fancying Rishi Sunak or Priti Patel, a 2-billion-year-old rock in America is now officially racist and has been relocated to avoid giving offence to students of colour. I kid you not.
The Chamberlin rock used to sit at the top of Observatory Hill at the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin. The forty-two-ton two-billion-year-old boulder is dark in colour. It is named after Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, a geologist and former university president who is utterly blameless.
However, certain “students of colour” claimed that the boulder was referred to as a derogatory name for Black people in a Wisconsin State Journal story in 1925. Apparently, almost one hundred years ago, folks did use the n word to describe boulders that were dark in colour. But this particular boulder of colour can only be shown to have been referred to, as such, once in history.
According to the Wisconsin State Journal, the Klu Klux Klan was active on the campus in the 1920s. That was actually the peak of KKK activity across America. The Klan was even glorified in Hollywood movies? How about we ban the patronising, virtue-signalling, liberal millionaires Hollywood from making any more movies in order not to offend anyone today? They are, after all, part of an industry inextricably linked to the KKK are they not?
There is no evidence that the Klan was ever active next to the racist rock but that is not the point. Based on one entry in an obscure journal written 96 years ago, a senior at the college, Juliana Bennett, proclaimed that “removing the rock signalled a small step toward a more inclusive campus … This moment is about the students, past and present, that relentlessly advocated for the removal of this racist monument …now is a moment for all of us BIPOC students to breathe a sigh of relief, to be proud of our endurance, and to begin healing.”
Actually there is no long history of hurt. Militant students of colour took time off from their pointless liberal arts courses to start this campaign less than 12 months ago. But why let facts get in the way of a good bit of old-fashioned woke idiocy.
The removal of the rock – which travelled all the way from Canada on ice sheets a billion years ago, so should surely be treasured as an early migrant – to another site off campus but on University land where it can still be studied by geology students was delayed as its new location was within 15 feet of a Native American burial site so special permits were needed. Naturally.
Another giant step, costing $50,000, for person, a huge leap for personkind.