It’s time for us to stop celebrating Columbus Day, elevate the real Italian American experience, and repair the harms done to Indigenous Peoples.
We’re coming up once more on a controversial American holiday: Columbus Day, which commemorates Italian explorer Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas in 1492. Columbus’ travels had devastating impacts on the Indigenous peoples who lived in the region known as the Americas, and on generations of people after them. It’s time for us to stop celebrating Columbus Day and focus our efforts elsewhere. But how?
For too many years, Christopher Columbus has been lauded as one of America’s preeminent Italian figures, serving as a symbol of Italian culture and heritage.
But Columbus’ legacy is one of theft, colonization, enslavement, and genocide.
Columbus’ supposed “discovery” of the Americas — a region already inhabited and cared for by Indigenous peoples — resulted in millions of deaths from disease, murder, and the other aftereffects of colonization. This is not a history to be celebrated; it’s one that cemented a history of horrific pain, atrocities, and division in the fabric of our country. Had one man’s journey gone differently, and had that man been different in his temperament, the country as we know it might have looked very different, too.
Furthermore, Christopher Columbus is not the only Italian ever to impact our country, and in fact many activists who came after him did so in a much more honorable way.
People like Angela Bambace, Ralph Fasanella, Arturo M. Giovannitti, Vito Russo, and countless other Italians and Italian Americans have contributed to the U.S. labor, women’s, arts and other movements.
But these are names we rarely learn about in history books to the extent we learn about Christopher Columbus. Why is that? And can we imagine something different?
Today, many activists have pushed for Columbus Day to be reimagined as Indigenous People’s Day, which explicitly honors the Indigenous peoples of the lands Americans now occupy. The question that remains is this: Can Italian-Americans still celebrate their heritage and culture without honoring arguably the most famous Italian public figure ever to arrive in this country?
I believe the answer is yes. I have said it before and I will say it again: diversity is what makes our country and our world stronger. Embracing our different languages, cultures, and pastimes benefits all of us.
There was a time when Italian-Americans were treated as second-class citizens in our country due to persistent anti-immigrant rhetoric at the time — sound familiar?
Despite many years of discrimination and hardship, Italian communities are thriving in the United States, with more than 16 million Americans identifying with Italian ancestry. Italian food, music, art, and culture are lauded all over the world. Italian Americans the likes of Frank Sinatra, Leonardo Dicaprio, Lady Gaga, Geraldine Ferraro, Robert De Niro, Anthony Fauci, Camille Paglia, and so many more have elevated their fields and shaped American culture in indefinable ways.
All of these are reasons to celebrate Italian heritage, and not one of them has to do with Christopher Columbus. It’s possible to celebrate Italian heritage and culture without also celebrating colonization. In fact, this is the direction in which we should all be moving.
I’m eager for our society to stop celebrating colonizers like Christopher Columbus and instead recognize our country’s vast, complicated history and the people at its root: the legacy of economic, political, and social inequity on which this country was founded; the ways that our country’s founding established a racial caste system; the Black and Indigenous peoples whose communities were most devastated by colonization, enslavement, and longstanding mistreatment. It is only once we recognize this history that we can work to make the future better for all people.
The future I envision for our country is one where all of us — Italian American and otherwise — do not worship Christopher Columbus as a hero in our country’s history, but recognize the atrocities he committed and commit to repairing the lingering harms from them.
I believe that we as a people have the potential to celebrate the ways people of all backgrounds have contributed to a more inclusive and diverse country for all of us,
keeping our history in mind, so that it may never repeat itself. I hope you’ll join the millions of us who are imagining this reality for all of us to create a nation where every one of us belongs.