Wear Black
In fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Whenever a state tries to do away with Columbus day, White folk in general and Italian-Americans in particular get peeved.
White dudes: This is the celebration of the beginning of white folk coming to America, and yeah, so the Indians got decimated. European-Americans have done a lot of great stuff! Why you gotta take our day away?
If the white dudes were right about the first part, I'd buy the second. But I don't think of Columbus day as "White History Day". I think of it as "first contact" day. And while European discovery of the Americas was perhaps an inevitability, as was the gross cultural misunderstanding that lead to the decimation of the dominant American languages and cultures of the time, it's nothing to celebrate.
I'm not in favor of removing the holiday from the calendar, just in favor of changing what we think about on the day. That first contact between cultures was the beginning of a long string of evil deeds. We should be mindful of who's writing the history books, and that humans can be counted on to exploit and murder other humans when it suits their economic interests. Because people could "get away with it", they did it.
Whenever a state tries to do away with Columbus day, White folk in general and Italian-Americans in particular get peeved.
White dudes: This is the celebration of the beginning of white folk coming to America, and yeah, so the Indians got decimated. European-Americans have done a lot of great stuff! Why you gotta take our day away?
If the white dudes were right about the first part, I'd buy the second. But I don't think of Columbus day as "White History Day". I think of it as "first contact" day. And while European discovery of the Americas was perhaps an inevitability, as was the gross cultural misunderstanding that lead to the decimation of the dominant American languages and cultures of the time, it's nothing to celebrate.
I'm not in favor of removing the holiday from the calendar, just in favor of changing what we think about on the day. That first contact between cultures was the beginning of a long string of evil deeds. We should be mindful of who's writing the history books, and that humans can be counted on to exploit and murder other humans when it suits their economic interests. Because people could "get away with it", they did it.
posted by Kenneth at 10:12 PM
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