Columbus, America, and How We Melt Into the Pot
When I was in my very early twenties, I lived in Memphis, attending college. I once decided to buy by Grandmother a replacement crucifix for Christmas, as the one she had been give by my now late Grandfather was getting worn, and I figured she could better preserve it if she didn’t wear it all the time. (Look, I never said I was smart.) Regardless, I walked into a jewelry store that had plenty of plain crosses on sale. I asked the lady working there for a crucifix, you know, the one with Jesus on it. She looked at me as if I had grown two heads, looked down her nose at me (no neat trick as I had half a foot on her), and said, “We don’t carry those things here.”
The conversation went downhill from there.
My point, and I do have one besides a lesson in customer service, is that I understand that our melting pot society never really melts everyone evenly. And that makes me at least a little sympathetic to the resistance to changing Columbus’ Day — but only a little. Celebrating Columbus was a way for Italians specifically, and Catholics a little more broadly, to become accepted as Americans. And that is not a small deal. American history, human history, has often been the drawing of lines, of putting one side in the acceptable category and the other in the non-acceptable category. The United States once had a political party dedicated to the hatred of Catholics and other non-WASPs. Moving past that by redrawing the lines was progress. Not enough progress, though, and that brings us to Columbus.
Columbus was a very bad person. This is not the reassessment of a modern age, but the opinions of his contemporaries. Even in a bad time, Columbus stood out as uniquely awful. And he was uniquely awful to Native Americans, a group of people who have been set outside the lines of acceptable since the beginning of the United States. Drawing them outside those lines is wrong and, whatever JD Vance may think, un-American. America is not the collection of dirt we stand upon, but rather the values that we stand for: freedom and equality for everyone. You cannot celebrate Native Americans by using a monster to celebrate Italians. It is, at the very least, impolite. You aren’t being a good neighbor.
It is okay to lose Columbo. As I have written before, your answers were almost certainly assholes — everyone’s ancestors were. Many of the very people we celebrate in this country were slaveholders, sexists, anti-Catholic bigots, etc. etc. But they also did something beyond that. No one is perfect. I promise you, if you have found a historical person you think is perfect that is almost certainly just because you don’t know enough about them. That does not mean we cannot celebrate the people who rose above their limitations, who did more good than harm. But it also means that we must be willing to acknowledge when it becomes clear that the hero of yesterday was much worse than yesterday would have us believe. And, at that point, take them off their pedestals.
Celebrating Italian culture is important. It is good to remind ourselves that we are a nation of immigrants, and that American culture is the bastard child of every other culture that has come here, mixed their own culture up with all the others they found here, and created something all its own. But we don’t do that by celebrating someone deservedly anathema to our neighbors. There are plenty of Italians with connections to America that we could celebrate. Clinging to Columbus is just, well, un-neighborly and un-American.
We do not diminish Columbus to hate Italians or Catholics. We diminish Columbus because he does not represent the best of Italian culture or what we want Americans to be. There are plenty of Italians who do not have Columbus’ flaws or history. We should celebrate those people in order to better live up to what it should mean to be an American.