Columbus is down!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This isn’t exactly mundane or pointless, but I’m not sure where to put it.

One thing I wouldn’t have predicted was that the current round of protests and the pulling down of statues would include the downing of statues of Christopher Columbus. But at least three statues of Columbus have been taken down in the past couple of days.

Here in Boston, the statue of him in the North End park named for him was beheaded this week. “Some demonstrators have said they targeted Columbus statues to stand in solidarity with Indigenous people.,” read one news report. One detail I’d missed when the statue was vandalized in 2015 was that they’d spray-painted “Black Lives Matter” on the back. I think part of the reason for this attack is that Boston doesn’t have statues of Confederate figures around, so this is the most obvious statue of an oppressor.

The statue, as I say, was beheaded, and the head was lying nearby. Both statue and head have been removed and put in storage. They don’t know what they’re going to do with them yet.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/us/christopher-columbus-statues-down-trnd/index.html
I was surprised to learn that Columbus statues in St. Paul Minnesota and Richmond, Virginia. The one is Richmond came down after the statue of Jefferson Davis there was toppled, and I think it came down as part of the same movement. It was tossed into a lake. The one in Minnesota was targeted by the American Indian Movement (AIM):

You can see footage of it coming down here:

I understand the reasons for the animus toward the statues of Columbus – I’ve read Howard Zinn and James Loewen, and know how Columbus treated the native Americans in the lands he took possession of (And condemnation of this is not a recent thing – Columbus was excoriated in his own time for his treatment of the Caribbean Indians). But the elevation of Columbus was something done for the benefit of the descendants of Italian immigrants (themselves a put-upon ethnic group), so removing the statues, as urged in recent years, had political pushback. It needed something like the current situation to make this happen.

2

I just learned that the Columbus statue in Miami, Florida also came down, making a total of at least four

3

Evidently there’s a call to remove the statue in Columbus Circle in new York City. I suspect that statue has been safe only because it’s so high and so prominent

4

Seems like a pretty logical escalation to me. Next up, George Washington and other presidents who were slave owners.

5

** Why Columbus Day Courts Controversy**

“Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.” That part is cool and worthy of remembrance but, unfortunately, he was involved in a lot of other things that we just can no longer overlook.

6

As noted in the OP:

7

This is not a logical follow-on to the removal of Confederate statues. It’s not a slippery slope; it’s the side of an entirely different mountain. The statues of Confederate soldiers were put up because they were oppressors, and dedicated to that oppression: They did nothing great other than championing the cause of oppression. But while Columbus was also an oppressor, that’s not the reason why we put up statues of him, and in fact most of the people who put up the statues were probably unaware of his oppression, and put them up to counter other oppression. His greatest deed, the one for which he is commemorated, was not inherently oppressive at all.

Now, maybe Columbus’ oppression was sufficiently horrible that it should be taken to outweigh his greatness. That’s a discussion that should happen. But it should be discussion, not knee-jerk action, because I reckon anyone ever got a statue made of him was some sort of sumbitch or another, and I don’t think anyone thinks we should tear down all statues of everyone.

8

I, for one, would like to see “Columbus Day” changed to “Indigenous Peoples Day”. Columbus basically kicked off centuries of imperial conquest around the globe that killed and enslaved indigenous people and stripped their lands of artifacts and resources. “Indigenous Peoples Day” would change the focus to remembering the millions who died or were suppressed when they were conquered.

“The sun never sets on the English empire!” We need to think about what that meant and the suffering it entailed.

9

Perhaps learn some history? The Disney film Pocahontas isn’t a documentary.

If we’re going to have Indigenous People Day, I think we should look to the Aztecs.

10

The Son-in-law recently changed jobs. He was working IT at a big medical center, and he was hired by one of the tribes of Native Americans in SCal to work IT in their business center.

He said they grant days off for all major holidays, save one.

They don’t acknowledge Columbus Day.
~VOW

11

So our state capital will have to be renamed?

12

This.

Moreover, many Confederate statues went up as responses to civil rights advances, pretty clearly as threats to the people being advocated for in the advances. For example, many of the Confederate statues on or around school campuses were erected in responses to moves that desegregated schools. The speeches at their dedications often made this more explicit and clear.

I do like having a discussion about whether to honor Columbus, and my own vote would be to pull him down, but I do see it as a question for legitimate debate.

Taking down a Confederate statue, however, should be as easy a decision as taking down a noose that white supremacists hung in a tree. They were threats.

13

Columbus Day isn’t a major holiday and outside of government and banks, almost no one gets it off. Same with Veterans Day.

There’s a ton of holidays that fall in the 4th quarter and so many people want the day after Thanksgiving off which isn’t a holiday anywhere.

14

I dunno, I read something like this and I’m fine with just melting every Columbus statue down.

15

Different mountains, maybe; but part of the same continent.

The USA committed two great original sins as part of its beginnings; both of them predating the country’s existence as a nation, but both of them affirmed at the beginning of the nation and continuing long after that. One of those sins was slavery. The other was the attempted extermination of the pre-existing cultures, culturally and often in the form of killing their members. Neither of these was inherent in European discovery of the continent – which had happened before; and it’s even possible to imagine the settlement of significant numbers of Europeans without either of these happening. However, the United States of America, as it actually came to exist, was based on both of those original sins; and would have been – and would be – considerably different if they hadn’t been committed.

And those sins were both rooted in the same idea: that only the culture and the bodies of white Europeans really mattered.

Columbus’ discovery of the continent / nearby islands was an accident. He wasn’t looking for what’s now called the Americas. He was looking for Asia; he had the size of the planet entirely wrong. The nation celebrates, not his fantastic ability to discover places or his fantastic navigation skills, but the fact that he got lost.

Now it’s true that most of the people who put up the statues and started Columbus Day, and even quite a few of the people defending the statues and the celebration, knew very little about Columbus, and that much of what they thought they knew was wrong. They were taught in school, as I was, that Columbus discovered America on purpose; that he was a genius who understood that the world was round when nobody else did. And they were not taught in school, as I was not, anything whatsoever about what he and those under his command did to the people they encountered.

In the 1950’s, and for that matter for most of the 20th century and before, for most people accurate information wasn’t readily available; nor, from what most people were taught, did there seem any reason to go try to hunt it up. That isn’t true now, for the great majority of people in the country.

I don’t think people who wanted to celebrate Columbus in 1920, or 1950, or even 1980 should be considered to blame, in the same sort of way that people who erected statues in the 20th century to Confederate generals can be considered to blame. But I also don’t think it’s really a different underlying issue.

16

With regards to Columbus, I think it would be potentially a case of overlooking flaws - that were so large they were not even acceptable to his peers - but celebrating only one crowning achievement despite those unrelated flaws.

So I’d be on the fence if he actually discovered something, but there’s no way you can say he discovered America. He didn’t mean to find it, others had already found it, (heck, Bering Strait denizens continuously went back and forth between the “new” world and the “old” like it was no big deal,) and he only barely discovered the mainland. So I don’t have to make the call.

I say take down his statues because he was a crappy voyager.

17

That said (and as I imagine you know, being in Chicago), Columbus Day has, at least in some areas, like here, become a de facto “Italian-American Heritage Day,” in the same way that St. Patrick’s Day has become the same for Irish-Americans.

18

I don’t know what you mean by this. The movie demonized most of the English, but it also glossed over the fate of Pocahontas and her tribe. Pocahontas married an English planter but died in England at about age of 20. Her tribe was decimated by conflicts with the English and virtually eliminated within a few decades.

Actually, Mexicans, many of whom are descended from both the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples and their Spanish conquerors, celebrate Columbus Day as the Dia de la Raza, recognized as the origin of the mestizo “race.”

19

It also didn’t show Pocahontas as a bald naked 12-year-old who liked to do cartwheels. Which would have been a pretty different movie.

20

And they promised it would only be Confederate statues. They broke their promise? Say it ain’t so!