Why Columbus Day was not about Columbus.

[usonian]

Repost.

"Columbus Day" had to do with anti-immigrant (anti-Italian) hate and violence, and was a demand by the Italian government to make some kind of amends for the lynching of 11 immigrants.

"Columbus Day" was a means, not an end. It actually helped end racist immigration restrictions in 1965.

Colonialism is wrong. Racism is wrong. Hating on immigrants is wrong, and they all factor in.

How Italians Became ‘White’
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html
Vicious bigotry, reluctant acceptance: an American story.

11 Italian-Americans were lynched by a mob in New Orleans. You know, "dirty immigrants"

President Harrison would have ignored the New Orleans carnage had the victims been black. But the Italian government made that impossible. It broke off diplomatic relations and demanded an indemnity that the Harrison administration paid. Harrison even called on Congress in his 1891 State of the Union to protect foreign nationals — though not black Americans — from mob violence.

Harrison’s Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. As the historian Danielle Battisti shows in “Whom We Shall Welcome,” they rewrote history by casting Columbus as “the first immigrant” — even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage.


Snip

The New Orleans lynching solidified a defamatory view of Italians generally, and Sicilians in particular, as irredeemable criminals who represented a danger to the nation. The influential anti-immigrant racist Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, soon to join the United States Senate, quickly appropriated the event. He argued that a lack of confidence in juries, not mob violence, had been the real problem in New Orleans. “Lawlessness and lynching are evil things,” he wrote, “but a popular belief that juries cannot be trusted is even worse.”

Facts aside, Lodge argued, beliefs about immigrants were in themselves sufficient to warrant higher barriers to immigration. Congress ratified that notion during the 1920s, curtailing Italian immigration on racial grounds, even though Italians were legally white, with all of the rights whiteness entailed. Italian-Americans labored in the campaign that overturned racist immigration restrictions in 1965

and they're back.
I'm following up this post with a big reminder from Indivisible.

Opinion:

We fight in the present to make a great future.
History is sometimes used as a learning tool. Most often, it's used to create grievance and vengeance, things that divide. Let's be INDIVISIBLE in the cause of justice, equality, dignity of all people and fairness.

See an argument against division here:
https://defragzone.substack.com/p/the-engineering-problem-with-democracy
The Beautiful Lie of Division: How We’re Being Kept Apart

Second, we start looking for common ground instead of differences. What do you and your “opponent” actually want? Strip away the labels, the team jerseys, the talking points. What do you both need to live a decent life? Probably the same things: safety, security, dignity, opportunity, health, a future for your kids. The inputs might look different, but the desired outputs are remarkably similar.

...

Believe me, they’re not afraid of you being wrong. They’re afraid of you being united. A society that disagrees about everything poses no threat. A society that agrees on even one or two fundamental things? That’s a revolution waiting to happen. That’s a system failure from their perspective. That’s game over.

So they keep us arguing about breakfast. About sports teams. About which billionaire is slightly less terrible than the other billionaire. About pronouns and statues and who gets to use which bathroom. And while we’re busy with all that, the game continues above our heads, unchanged and unchallenged.

You don’t have to agree with your neighbor about everything. You don’t have to share their religion, their diet, their politics, or their taste in music. But you might want to ask yourself: what do we agree on? Because that’s where the power is. That’s what they’re afraid of. That’s the exploit in the system they never patched.

Play to win a grocery store argument, or play to win the power to defeat excessive greed, racism, hate and division.

And by the way.



You must choose wisely.

🇺🇸🇮🇹

[JI7]

1. That's interesting. I think these days it's mostly celebrating Italian culture

[Prairie Gates]

3. You think Columbus Day celebrates Italian culture?

[Ocelot II]

4. Maybe that was its original intent, but more recently it's been a "celebration"

of the so-called "discovery" of America by white Europeans who declared the people they found there to be inferior creatures who could be eliminated or enslaved or driven off their land. Accordingly, Columbus Day has come to be represented as a great event in history even though Columbus was lost, had no idea where he was and never got anywhere near what is now the continental US, but he claimed wherever the hell he was (somewhere in the Bahamas, as it turned out) for Spain, despite the fact that people were already living there.

[JI7]

5. I don't know but I mean mostly the Italians themselves

I don't think it's really "celebrated" by most people.

[Prairie Gates]

6. Some Italian Americans, maybe

It really has nothing to do with Italian culture at all.

[Ocelot II]

2. Almost every successive immigrant group was treated as inferior interlopers.

The Irish, the Italians, and the eastern European Jews probably got the worst of it at first, but even German and Scandinavian Protestants were frequently treated as ignorant and culturally backward. Many immigrants actually ended up returning to whatever their old country had been because America the Beautiful wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be. Once they or their descendants assimilated, though, formerly despised immigrants started pulling up the drawbridge behind them to keep out newer immigrants - Chinese laborers in the early 20th century, Japanese immigrants who were treated appallingly during WWII, and now it's Hispanic people from Mexico, central and south America. Everybody has to have someone to hate, I guess. Not to mention all the African "immigrants" who were kidnapped and "immigrated" involuntarily.

And then there's Trump, who - obviously having no idea of the history or original purpose of Columbus Day, decides it can't also be called Indigenous People's Day, as it still is in many states. Because who cares about the people whose land was stolen by the immigrants who then successively discriminated against each other?