Opinion | The Performative Antiracism of Black Students at the U. of Wisconsin - The New York Times

"96 years ago, when the rock was placed where it was until just now, someone in a local newspaper called it — brace yourself — a “niggerhead.”

That didn’t settle in as a permanent nasty local moniker for the rock. It was just something some cigar-chomping scribbler wrote in 1925. But still, the Wisconsin Black Student Union, making one of the kinds of demands such groups started pushing with especial fervor last year, insisted that the rock be taken away....

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....

Yes, racism persists in our society in many ways, and administrators serving up craven condescension as antiracism are fine examples of it."