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Somehow a Genoese sailor, born now nearly 600 years ago, has become one of the most controversial and damned figures in history. And that was enough to have the often thoughtful and certainly hard-working Franklin School Committee remove him from the school calendar, even though the date they have now redesignated as “indigenous peoples day,” will still fall on the federally designated Columbus Day.
The current mania for change is, unfortunately, propelled by a culture that values small insights rather than deeper ones and imagines that those living today are inevitably smarter, wiser, and above all morally superior to those that have gone before. Removing Columbus from the calendar (the date commemorates his arrival at a Caribbean island not his birth date) diminishes an opportunity to engage in critical thinking about him and his world and about who we are today.
Adults usually learn that reality is neither black nor white. They regularly make decisions that involve weighing conflicting factors. Thinking about Columbus should be no different.
One of the comments that propelled the brief conversation within the School Committee meeting, prior to a unanimous vote to demote the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, was a statement that Columbus didn’t really “discover” America because there were already people living in the hemisphere with a successful and sophisticated culture.
A good point but sophomoric. The linguistic shorthand in the “discovered America” statement reflects that fact that a lot of history was written by word-mad Europeans and their cultural offspring. To them, it was a discovery of incalculable importance. It could also be said that he allowed western hemisphere inhabitants to discover Europeans. In any case, what makes Columbus significant is all that flowed from his actions.
Of course, critics have also noted that he wasn’t ‘first’ because Vikings made multiple trips to North America and many others ranging from Phoenecians to Chinese may have also made it (but the evidence is at best limited) and still others may have done so regularly but secretly (Basques). But incontrovertibly, Columbus, a truly remarkable navigator and leader, not only traveled from one hemisphere to another and back but did so multiple times and then publicized his accomplishments – fundamentally altering the world. The Europeans that followed in his wake quickly knit the world into a whole, circumnavigating the globe within a generation and opening trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic trade on a growing scale.
The old world gained much – especially a host of new staples that quickly fed millions more people than ever before, especially in China, and changed the palate and the plate of Europeans, too. The western hemisphere gained a host of domestic animals, a few new crops and access to technologies, and, sadly, to disease and enslavement.
Columbus himself was guilty on a number of occasions of brutality and murder, but his actions were scarcely exceptional for those time or perhaps for ours. Little more than two centuries earlier, Genghis Khan (to use one of the many spellings of his name) is reputed to have slaughtered some 40 million people across Europe and Asia – roughly 10 percent of global population at the time. That’s equivalent to erasing 800 million people today, substantially greater than the entire population of North America.
These numbers are numbing and are not intended to minimize in any way the human cost of what happened to the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere. The tremendous negatives must be recognized and acknowledged. But putting things in perspective and judging them fairly is the job of adults. This deeper understanding must start with acknowledging Columbus and seeing his position in history with clarity. His absence from the school calendar diminishes any effort to contextualize and understand the world he made, the world we inhabit.
Critical thinking, apparently no longer valued, requires that people look at history and at contemporary problems with breadth and honesty; unflinchingly. To acknowledge the reality of Columbus and his accomplishments and excesses is to bookend a whole host of other potential insights and understandings. For example, some Europeans were also hurt by his discovery. Columbus helped to make the trading cities of Italy, long prosperous centers of learning and culture, less relevant as the nations along the Atlantic developed an oceanic global trade. So, perhaps Italian Americans might choose to blame and excoriate him with as much justice as do those who invoke the suffering of indigenous people.
Another unfortunate aspect of the endless Columbus discussion is the frequent refence to colonial ism....as if this were some actual ideology.
It would be much more direct and useful to everyone to simply say the western hemisphere was conquered just as Mongols conquered China, Central Asia, Persia, and Eastern Europe; Muslims conquered (for a time) most of India; or as Inca conquered Chimor. Haughtiness is a common trait of conquerors and Europeans exhibited that trait, particularly in the late 19th
century when Darwin’s theory was transmuted into the racist ideologies used to justify further brutality, exploitation, and the conquest of much of Asia and almost all of Africa.
Again, honest and complete discussions of what is known or knowable about history should be the goal of educators rather than history trivialized into a series of flavorless parables.
If there is one positive in the school committee’s actions it is that it was done swiftly before the public knew. So, we have been spared a lengthy and potentially divisive debate. But it is a topic that matters to many people. Sweeping it through with a snap vote is disappointing. And, in the end, erasing Columbus solves nothing.
IMAGE:The fallen Christopher Columbus statue outside the Minnesota State Capitol after a group led by American Indian Movement members tore it down in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 10, 2020. https://www.flickr.com/photos/diversey/50000129917/Author Tony Webster, used under Creative Commons license.
