Wokeness has jumped the shark, yet again, as archeology students excavate the 50-year-old trash, poo and other personal belongings of “displaced Aurarians” with the intention of housing found items in a forthcoming museum.
Before we dive into the absurdity of creating a museum to display 50-year-old garbage, it’s worth explaining the history of the so-called “displaced Aurarians.” After a devastating flood in 1965 put most of Denver’s Auraria neighborhood underwater, the city decided to redevelop the area into a modern urban campus. While some residents resisted and were ultimately forced to leave, this is another instance of eminent domain run amuck and not another Trail of Tears.
It’s important to note here that the label “displaced Aurarians” applies to decedents, too. Because if you’re a woke liberal, you believe that victimhood not only defines the rest of your life but that it also gets passed down to the next generation. This is why decades after the displacement of these families, “campus leaders are undertaking a number of efforts to begin reparations and healing for the communities forced out.”
When we initially read this story in the spring our first thought was that CU Regent Nolbert Chavez, who is spearheading this project, is just another example of an opportunistic politician trying to earn his 15-minutes of fame, and it is most certainly that. However, the latest news of excavations at the site of this old neighborhood has taken this story deeper into the territory of the absurd.
Sure, it’s cool for the anthropology students that get to practice doing actual fieldwork. No doubt it’s more fun than sitting in class. But, do the rest of us really have to pretend like the stuff they find near the old trash pit and outhouse are museum-worthy?
Some of these so-called “displaced Aurarians” are still alive and can just tell us what their life was like before they relocated to a new house outside of a floodplain. It’s also such recent history that we know what kind of food people ate and what kind of clothes they wore, and it doesn’t sound like particularly interesting museum fodder.
It’s also weird and discriminatory to create a museum that focuses on just one ethnic group’s history in Auraria. The neighborhood was established by miners in 1858 and was home to many different groups of European immigrants long before Latinos started settling there in the 1920s. But we’re not holding our breath for that piece of earlier history to be included since it doesn’t fit into the woke narrative of the day.