Let’s talk about Christopher Columbus. After all, he’s a paisan, and I can say that as an Italian American. Actually, Italy didn’t exist when he was alive, he was Genoese and lived most of his life in Portugal. But hey, let’s not let reality get in the way of a good story, okay?
Well, I’m going to do just that. I first learned about Chris’s involvement in the slave trade while in high school. I don’t think it was in the history books we had, it was a teacher who decided to point it out as a side note. Later, I learned that he captured and enslaved Native Americans on his first voyage, and then enslaved hundreds more on other trips. Then I learned that he was also a sex slave trader, which was a massive enterprise in his day. It just kept getting worse for Chris the more I looked into him. At one point he was brought back to Spain in chains and charged with being too brutal to the colony he headed in what is now Haiti. Just imagine what you would have to do to make the King of Spain feel like he’d better reel you in some. Chris was a brutal guy by every account, including his own diaries.
What I didn’t know until very recently was how weird the history of celebrating him in modern-day America really is. The celebration of Columbus goes hand in glove with the evolution of whiteness in America, and it’s also the story of how many immigrants chose to become “white” to avoid discrimination.
Before the late 1700s, the colonies didn’t think much about Chris, after all, he never even set foot on the mainland of what would become the United States. However, around the time of the Revolution and the formation of the U.S. government, a non-British origin story began to develop in popular culture. It culminated in Washington Irving’s fictionalized account in 1828 called A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. The work created a glorified version of Columbus as an adventurer who discovered America and proved the world wasn’t flat. Of course, no one with an education in 1492 thought the world was flat, and “discovered” is a pretty loaded word. But Irving was a fiction writer, not a historian, and he set out to create an American hero, and it worked. The book became a popular read at the time and fit nicely into the developing non-British-centric American mythology.
So Italian immigrants seized on the story in an attempt to curtail the massive amount of racism they were experiencing in America. Recognizing that the white population was embracing Chris as a hero led some Italian immigrants to attach their heritage to this fictionalized character. Italians weren’t considered “white” in the 1800s and were being discriminated against and killed in startling numbers. So over the coming decades, they pushed the Columbus origin story as a way to pull themselves into accepted society. As their entry into whiteness. The story of Columbus is the story of how Italians became white in America.
With every twist and turn, Columbus became a nicer, whiter, representation of civilization vs. savagery. The Knights of Columbus, working to gain equality for Italian Catholics, pushed and evolved the mythology to the point where it became a national holiday in 1934. I never met my Italian Grandfather; he came to America and fought in WWI before settling in the near west side of Chicago. But he was part of the last generation of Italians who weren’t raised to consider themselves part of the “white” club in America.
So when I grew up, I was taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America, and then the Pilgrims broke bread with the natives. I mean, what else can you really tell the children? Definitely not the truth. You can’t tell them he was the beginning of the occupation. That he instantly started enslaving people. Or that his “discovery” set off a series of Papal Bulls that later would become known as the Doctrine of Discovery, giving Europeans a license to steal land. The same set of Christian values that gave us Manifest Destiny. The same values that evolved to create boarding schools in America and Canada that were designed to wipe out the last vestiges of Indigenous culture. I mean, you could teach the children that if you wanted them to cry. But instead, we were taught a myth about creating civilization out of savagery. That is the tale we spun throughout the 20th century, with the help of Italian immigrants who contributed their own yarn into the fabric of American mythology.
But of course, it’s not the real story, the real story is one of savages coming from overseas to steal land and perform genocide in the name of a religion that itself was named after someone who probably would have sided with the natives. The Italians could have stood up to the racism in their day and sided with the other oppressed people, the recently freed slaves or the natives being rounded up into smaller and smaller plots of land, but they didn’t. They opted for entry into the white club by spinning a tale that worked perfectly into the narrative of dominance.
So yes, let’s take the statues down, put them in a museum and teach people the real story of Columbus, of how Italians chose to become white to save themselves, and how by erasing history we all remain ignorant and dare I say, savage.