Why Do People Still Get Defensive About Christopher Columbus?
This should be the easiest thing in the world to get over.
I’m a bit late to this party, but it seems that a little while ago, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’ presidential campaigns got in a back-and-forth over Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day. Basically, Harris made a campaign speech referring to the holiday as “Indigenous People’s Day,” wherein she expounded on how important it was not to overlook the sad fate of North American indigenous peoples over the past few centuries (“we must not shy away from this shameful past”). Now, like much else that she says and does, this was shamefully hypocritical for Harris to have said – I’ll get to that in a bit. First, the other side’s reaction. The Trump campaign responded by (what else) branding Harris a “leftist” – God, I wish – insisting that Christopher Columbus was a “hero,” and reassuring aggrieved whites everywhere that a future Trump administration will refer to the holiday by its proper, God-given name of “Columbus Day.”
Let me put my cards on the table here: I’ve never understood why anyone continues to get upset over criticisms, especially tepid ones, of Christopher Columbus. Why do people insist on “identifying” (if that is the right word) with the man so strongly? The Founding Fathers I can at least understand: every country has its founding mythology, and tends to deify its original statesmen. But Columbus? Who cares?
Even if you believe the silly clichés (e.g., that Columbus “discovered” North America despite it being inhabited by millions of people at the time of his arrival), I still don’t see how that warrants this obsession with protecting his image – or rather, his myth. Maybe it’s because there’s a lot of propaganda instilled from youth about Columbus (at least, there was when I was a kid). But even then, I’ve never understood why people succumb to it. From elementary to middle to high school, I was largely taught the sanitized version of the Columbus story, but even so, I never felt any sense of affection or admiration for the man, any more than I did for other “discoverers” like Amerigo Vespucci or Ferdinand Magellan.1 Then, as I got older, I began to hear whispers that the truth was much darker.
By the time I got through the first couple chapters of Howard Zinn a little while later, I’d confirmed for myself that this was in fact the case. Since then, I’ve pretty much had it with all the dweebs whining and moaning about how “no one respects Christopher Columbus anymore.” I became even less patient when they began freaking out about changing the holiday’s name. It’s now widely discussed, even in the mainstream, that Columbus killed an awful lot of the people he encountered when he made landfall in the New World, and that he forcibly enslaved and kidnapped numerous others. Those are pretty good reasons to not name a holiday after someone. And hey, all they did was change the name – you still get your day off, so what is there to complain about? The way I see it, either these people are willfully ignorant of Columbus’s crimes, or else they know about them, and don’t care. Or worse, they see them as all the more reason to honor him. Either way – yikes.
Over the years, I’ve made the mistake of engaging with a couple people who get really passionate about devotion to Columbus for some set of inscrutable reasons, and it’s painful. It’s like dealing with children who can’t handle being told that Santa isn’t real. Except, these children are in their 40s (or older), and they never, ever seem to get over it. Inevitably, they argue that changing the name of the holiday is “erasing history.”
It should go without saying that this is nonsense. These are the people who cover their ears and yell so they don’t have to hear about what Columbus & co. were actually like. They have no interest in history – zero, none, zilch, nada. Their interest is in protecting, at all costs, the myths they learned at the same age as when they learned about the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. The difference is that when it comes to Columbus, their parents never sat them down and broke it to them that the heroic, Indian-loving legend they were reared on is about as realistic as, well, the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. And so it isn’t until they reach adulthood that they’re confronted with this. And then when they finally hear it, they’re all snarls. It’s quite pathetic, because if you care about historical truth for its own sake, irrespective of ideology, then there’s no reason whatsoever for refusing to acknowledge that Columbus killed indigenous people and took them as slaves, and was in many ways greedy, ruthless, and cruel. If facing those relatively anodyne truths causes you to devolve into hysterics, then learning about history – which mostly consists of similar atrocities, but on a far vaster scale – probably isn’t for you.
I remember how this same childish impulse was on display roughly a decade or so ago when there was talk of replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. I was less radical then than I am now, but even at the time, I was astonished at some of the reactions from people I knew. Granted, in those days I was a cadet at a Maritime Academy, an environment that attracts angry young Caucasian males and deliberately keeps them that way for four years, so my experience may have been somewhat atypical. Still, the way many of my classmates reacted, you’d have thought Hitler was going on the currency (come to think of it, that probably would’ve elicited a more muted reaction). One particularly incensed person2 was livid that replacing Jackson with Tubman would be – you guessed it – “erasing history.” How replacing the image of one very well-known historical figure with another very well-known historical figure would have amounted to “erasing history” escapes me. At worst, it would have been a draw.
More importantly, from a “basic decency” standpoint, the switch would’ve been an obvious win. Andrew Jackson was responsible for the Trail of Tears (among other horrors), whereas Tubman risked her life to free slaves. Why the hell was this proposal ever controversial? Why on Earth would anyone identify, or want to identify, with a monster like Jackson?
Then a few years after that, these attitudes were on full display once more, this time reacting to the demise of statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate icons. For the gazillionth time, out came the disingenuous shrieks about “erasing history.” The capacity of these people for deluding themselves about this was astounding to behold. Obviously, none of them knew very much about the realities of slavery, the Civil War, the failure (really the sabotage) of Reconstruction, convict leasing, lynchings, Jim Crow et. al. Nor did they realize that those statues didn’t just magically appear one day, but were erected in a very particular, and nauseating, context. Statues of Confederate leaders were put up by racist, post-segregation state governments to instill fear among the (nominally) free black population and to “reshape Civil War history.” If those wallowing in sorrow over the sudden dearth of public tributes to Stonewall Jackson knew this, they wouldn’t have dreamt of objecting to their removal, since they were the equivalent of statues of Goebbels and Himmler erected in Jewish neighborhoods by a Nazi-sympathizing postwar German government. Or maybe such people still would have complained had they known this. In which case – yikes.
Some people who agreed with me about the Confederate statues nonetheless objected when a few depicting the likes of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln were removed as well. Somehow this was seen as going “too far.” On what grounds, I’m not sure. I guess it’s because those three were considered “better” than the Confederates. Regarding Washington and Jefferson, who were both slaveowners (and that’s just for starters), I can’t see why. And as for Lincoln? Honestly, I think statues of anyone are a bad idea. The tendency to make idols out of fallible human beings – even comparatively admirable ones like Lincoln (who was nonetheless far from perfect) – is the first step on the road to trouble.
From a pretty young age, thanks in part to my interpretation of the Dune novels, I’ve felt that creating hero myths and personality cults, to which statues and memorials are always crucial, is inherently destructive. This is the central message of Dune Messiah, the second book which essentially berates readers for having identified with Paul Maud’dib in the original Dune, which had only slyly hinted at author Frank Herbert’s strongly negative views toward the idea of heroes (“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero”). Pretty good advice, I thought, and still think. It’s why I’ve always sympathized with the Islamic injunction prohibiting depictions of Muhammad, lest Muslims fall into idolatry. Same goes for the commandment prohibiting the carving of any graven images. Hell, sometimes I’m even a little ambivalent about my Kurt Vonnegut coffee mug.
But back to the statues – I’m not just complaining; I actually have a solution that would work well. They should all be removed, brought to one central location, and turned into a giant outdoor park where visitors can observe all the false idols and graven images of the past. The inspiration for this idea originated with my visit to Budapest some years ago. See, Hungary has a pretty vicious fascist history, with the Arrow Cross Party enthusiastically volunteering to collaborate with the Nazi extermination project, deporting to the camps many of Budapest’s’ Jews who might otherwise have remained safe. The city now boasts a number of prominent holocaust memorials. Later, Hungary was swallowed up by the Soviet empire, and had Stalinist tyranny imposed on it. Numerous statues glorifying figures associated with the “Hungarian People’s Republic” went up during this period.
Today, those statues have since been removed – but they’re not gone. They can be found on the outskirts of Budapest in Memento Park – a visually arresting, desolate outdoor space for Communist-era statues that’s open to the public. This is a great solution – the statues are removed from the main city, and thus no longer glorified. But instead of being destroyed, they became the focal point of a deliberately dreary landscape where people can gaze upon all the Ozymandias’s of past regimes.
Well, not all of them. It must be said that Budapest, and Hungary generally, seem far less willing to remove their fascist statues than their Communist ones. Indeed, many statues celebrating Arrow Cross leaders have been prominently placed throughout Budapest since 2013, a reflection of Viktor Orban’s increasingly autocratic rule, one which not-so-subtly looks fondly back on the nation’s Christian fascist days. Indeed, Budapest’s House of Terror Museum, which Orban was instrumental in setting up, is a classic exercise in minimizing Hungarian complicity with fascism, while simultaneously taking pains to emphasize the suffering of the (in this narrative) innocent Hungarian people under Communism. So Hungary is obviously not a model in that regard. Nonetheless, the idea of a park for depositing statues of criminals is.
We could have a few of them scattered throughout the United States. There are probably more than enough monuments to Lee, Jackson, Jefferson, Washington, and, I’m sure, Columbus, to put one in every state! No one could accuse this idea of “erasing history,” either, since if anything, it’d simply be relocating it. And on that point, it’s worth noting that no one actually learns history from looking at a statue anyway. The idea that merely having statues of Lee or Jackson (or Lincoln, Columbus, et. al.) somehow instilled people in their vicinity with historical insight is absurd – especially when you consider how dimwitted the people objecting to their removal were. In the same way, no one ever learned about Columbus or the world he and his victims inhabited merely because they had a day off in his name every October. Certainly no one came to an appreciation of the political economy of Jacksonian American by withdrawing 20’s from an ATM. Only reading and teaching and open conversations can adequately educate in this way.
I should also say that if the right gets far too worked up over the purely symbolic name change from Columbus to Indigenous People’s Day (or the failed attempt to replace Jackson with Tubman, or the removal of Confederate statues), so too do more than a few people to their left, albeit for different reasons. In the latter case, far too many delude themselves into thinking that these changes will actually accomplish anything other than making us feel a little better. Which is not to denigrate feeling better; merely to point out that it is no substitute for concrete, material change. Removing statues, even if they end up in my highly idealized idea for a park, will do nothing to end police brutality, close the wealth gap (racial or otherwise), or breathe life into communities destroyed by neoliberal austerity politics. And even if all of us start calling it “Indigenous People’s Day,” that won’t do anything to help the indigenous people alive today who’ve survived the genocide perpetrated against their ancestors by white settlers.
Neither will it do anything for indigenous people elsewhere in the world, which brings me back to Harris’s speech. It’s wildly hypocritical for her to get on a soapbox about the importance of acknowledging the plight of indigenous groups, when she has pledged to continue the literal extermination of Palestine’s indigenous population, and in fact is deeply complicit in doing so right now. And yet I’m willing to bet that countless CNN liberals don’t notice the contradiction. Or don’t care. Either way – yikes.
If you’re horrified by what settler colonialism, taken to its logical conclusion, is doing right now in Gaza (and if you’re not, know that most of the planet has seething contempt for you), remember that it did the same thing here in North America. So by all means, we should call it “Indigenous People’s Day.” It’s quite literally the very least we can do. We just shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that doing so represents anything more than a belated recognition (and a shallow one at that) of a gruesome reality, rather than any kind of substantive change.
And whatever you do, don’t be one of those people who goes red in the face when confronted with mild factual criticisms of Christopher Columbus. We’re all too old for that.
It did, however, take me a bit longer to get over the cult of the Founders, which, if you’re an Enlightenment-influenced white male, is much more enticing.
They wanted to be a police officer, by the way. I think that’s very telling.