Enough Already with Christopher Columbus
To my fellow Italian Americans,
Despite what you may have learned in elementary school, Christopher Columbus was not a hero or champion of Italian culture. He was a man whose voyage was funded by land and property seizures of Jewish and Muslim Spaniards. He was a man who stole from his own people. A man who, when one of his ships ran ashore was stuck in rocks and nearly destroyed, later wrote in his journal that the Indigenous people who helped him were peaceful, and therefore would be easily dominated. He did not “discover” a place already inhabited by millions of people. He was a man who cut off the ears, hands, and heads of people who did not find enough gold for him. A man who sold nine and ten year old girls as sex slaves. A man whose actions set the tone for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Many of the statues of Columbus were created before all of this information was easily accessible. The facts about Columbus are now more readily available though, and there is no disputing that Columbus, far from being a hero, was in reality a perpetrator of extreme violence and brutality.
Recently I watched as news story after news story detailed angry Italian Americans at a city council meeting in Los Angeles defending Christopher Columbus. A man who is a symbol of colonialism and oppression. A genocidal maniac who raped, murdered, and enslaved innumerable Indigenous people. There is so much undisputed information available about how atrocious Columbus was (some literally in his own hand) that the only conclusion I can come to is everyone defending Columbus is doing so out of stubborn arrogance.
You claim that knocking Columbus off his pedestal (sometimes literally), is an erasure of Italian heritage, but let me be clear — using Columbus as a heroic figure to celebrate our culture is outright offensive to the culture itself. Refusing to honor a villainous murderer, who so blatantly cared about nothing aside from himself and gold, does not erase any part of our heritage. Columbus is the antithesis of Italian American culture.
I understand that you’re scared. You think that statues of Columbus remind America that the Italian culture is worthy of commemoration. You think America has forgotten how our people were treated when we first immigrated to America. How we were wrongly discriminated against, lived in crowded and unsanitary conditions. How people refused to let us work, called us derogatory names, claimed we were predisposed to violence, and sometimes killed us for no reason. There is no argument that the rhetoric of a century ago (which ironically and depressingly is the same hateful language being used to discriminate against immigrants of color today) was unfounded and hurtful.
All my life I’ve heard stories about the ways in which my family was mistreated simply because they ate Italian food, wore different clothes, and worshipped in seemingly strange ways. But, in case you haven’t noticed, Italian Americans have fully assimilated into mainstream white America. We have infiltrated every aspect of American culture. The discrimination our ancestors experienced was reprehensible, but in no way does it even begin to compare with the injustices that did and still do affect Indigenous Peoples.
Eliminating Christopher Columbus as a heroic figure worthy of celebration and replacing the holiday with Indigenous Peoples Day is only a very small step in a long process of acknowledging and apologizing for atrocities committed against Indigenous Peoples. Atrocities committed by one of our own.
Remove the statues. Rename the holiday. Refuse to accept a racist murderer and rapist as a representative of Italian American culture.
Vi voglio bene.
