THE LEGACY OF COLOMBUS & THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF ITALIANS AND ITALIAN AMERICANS
BY C HUES
OCTOBER 11, 2021
Many Italian Americans claim Christopher Columbus as a hero, all the while ignoring the copious atrocities (such as rape, murder, forced starvation, and the extensive spreading of disease)[1] that he and his men committed against Indigenous peoples. The hero worship of Columbus as an American icon is ironic and tragic because Italian Americans were considered an inferior race of people by the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) society. In fact, WASPs regularly denigrated Italian immigrants by making racist comparisons between Italians and African Americans. Columbus never explored the United States in his voyages. He did not represent Italy in his conquests, he did not discover any new lands (as these lands were already inhabited by Indigenous peoples), and most of Italian immigrants to the Americans did not hold Columbus in high regard.
One proponent of Columbus Day, George Vendegnia, has even argued, contrary to actual historical events and sentiments, that “”this holiday goes back to our ancestors… we celebrate for them.”[2] However, the initial Italian immigrants did not actually care for Columbus, and their reasoning stems from ethnic, monetary, and social divides between the North and the South of Italy. In The Sopranos, (arguably the most acclaimed television show in history),[3] Season 4 episode 4, “Christopher”, the character of Furio, an Italian immigrant and member of mob boss Tony Soprano’s crew, states that
“I never liked Columbus. In Napoli, a lot of people are not so happy for Columbus. Cause he was from Genoa…The North of Italy always had the money and the power. They punish the South since hundreds of years. Even today, they put up their nose to us like we’re peasants. I hate the North.”[4]
Even before the immigration to the United States, Italy was divided between the North and the South, and comparisons of Italians to blacks were prevalent.
“Northern political leaders confronted southern resistance movements against the state not only with marital law but also by stigmatizing peasants as ‘criminal members of a racially inferior people’…to justify such beliefs, they relied on the ‘evidence’ provided by Italy’s leading positivist anthropologists, who argued that the darker ‘Mediterranean’ southerners were racially distinct from the lighter ‘Aryan’ northerners because they possessed ‘inferior African blood’ and demonstrated ‘a moral and social structure reminiscent of primitive and even quasibarbarian times, a civilization quite inferior.’ Southern Italy’s location as a crossroads joining Africa, Europe, and the East, they believed, had given birth to a people with an ‘inherent racial inferiority.’”[5]
Upon their predominant arrival to America from 1880 to 1920, Italian immigrants and their children also did not form a unified Italian identity since Italy had only been officially established as a nation in 1861.[6] Therefore, just as how Italians were divided culturally, politically, ethnically, and economically in the North and South, they also faced strife amongst themselves in the United States. Their previous attachments were to specific regions and cultures of Italy rather than Italy as a nation, and they carried these sentiments with them to America. Thus, the very first Italian Americans were not loyal to Columbus, as most were immigrants from the South, and the South largely held an aversion toward the North for the latter’s prejudices and discrimination.[7] It is ironic then, that by the turn of the 20th century, many Italian Americans began to take pride in Christopher Columbus despite the initial detestation that their ancestors harbored for him. Italian Americans were subjected to ethnic violence such as lynching, they faced discrimination and segregated seating in churches and public transportation, and the media regularly portrayed them as violent criminals.[8] At the height of Italian immigration, Italian workers were not viewed as “white”, with an instance in 1890 corroborating that a construction boss viewed Italian workers as “dagos” and said they were not truly white.[9] Likewise, “the epithet guinea, for example, was used by whites to mark African slaves and their descendants as inferior before it was applied to Italians at the turn of the twentieth century.”[10] These instances further substantiated that the treatment of Italian Americans was more similar to that of Black Americans than to White American Protestants. Author Sam Hitchmough suggests that today, some Italian Americans have taken steps to distance themselves from African Americans, and the celebration of Christopher Columbus as a hero is a way to gain acceptance as “white”:
““Italians often distance themselves through a narrative of self-righteousness about their own struggles in the United States,” often blaming socioeconomic problems on the supposedly deficient character of others, particularly African Americans, rather than on “the political institutions and methods of economic production that preserve white upper-class power” (Rieder, 1987, cited in Guglielmo and Salerno, 2003: 4). In other words, “while whiteness has acted as a huge subsidy to working-class whites, it has also severely limited their ability to effectively dismantle the systems of inequality that threaten their own lives” to the extent that “today, Italian-Americans stand in for the very image of white ethnic working-class right-wing conservatism” (Guglielmo and Salerno, 2003: 4).”[11]
Conversely, the author Carol Delaney argues that,
“Today, Columbus is not a flesh and blood person, but a symbol. The dominant picture holds him responsible for everything that went wrong in the New World. Debates about his legacy are political and vehement. Every Columbus Day, protests are staged and statues of him are desecrated. No longer is Columbus the man who was proposed for canonization in the nineteenth century; instead he is an avaricious sinner who committed genocide…Judging Columbus from a present day ethical standard is not only anachronistic, it reduces their intention to its (unintended) effects; that is, it mistakes the consequences for the motivations. My purpose is not to exonerate Columbus, but to situate him in his cultural context and to shift some of our attention from the man to the religious ideas that motivated him and were widely shared by his contemporaries—ideas that have reemerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”[12]
Delaney’s assertions are dangerous in myriad ways; she erroneously emphasizes religion as the prime motivator of Columbus’ voyage instead of his true motivations of greed and power, she uses the tired narrative of the historical figure as a product of his time to reduce or remove the insidious and violent acts that the man committed, and she fails to understand or empathize with the Indigenous community and their reasons for protesting Columbus as an icon or hero of the United States. The suggestion that one should not assess “Columbus from a present day ethical standard” is an asinine excuse which attempts to remove any culpability for the crimes that many historical figures have committed in the name of religion, country, societal norms of the era, or whatever else. The same logic (or lack thereof) can be used to justify the rape of female slaves by slave owners (which was prevalent throughout American history).[13][14] Perhaps Thomas Jefferson was merely a product of his time, according to this reasoning. Maybe Andrew Jackson’s maltreatment of the Native Americans should be excused because his intentions did not match that of the consequences of said motivations. As author Maureen Konkle clarifies, “Andrew Jackson justified removal as a humane way to protect Indians who he asserted were doomed if forced to continue to reside near white civilization.”[15] Simply because Jackson’s intentions may have been good or at least justified in his mind, does not then assuage him from the responsibility of the violence and terror that he and his regime inflicted upon Indigenous Americans. Good intentions do not outweigh, nullify, or otherwise justify unintended consequences. Likewise, Columbus’ intentions are meaningless to the Indigenous population who were subjected to torture, death, and many other forms of evil acts because of his policies. Finally, in examining Columbus’ own journal, he makes clear that his motivations are predominantly influenced by his allegiance to the Spanish royalty. On an early voyage on October 14, 1492, in Guanahani, Columbus writes,
“It is true that within this reef there are some sunken rocks, but the sea has no more motion than the water in a well. In order to see all this I went this morning, that I might be able to give a full account to your Highness, and also where a fortress might be established. I saw a piece of land which appeared like an island, although it is not one and on it there were six houses. It might be converted into an island in two days, though I do not see that it would be necessary, for these people are very simple as regards the use of arms, as your highness will see from the seven that I caused to be taken, to bring home and learn our language and return; unless your highness should order them all to be brought to Castille, or to be kept as captives on the same island; for with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.”[16]
Columbus was not concerned with Christianity so much as he was doing the bidding of his sponsors and benefactors such as Alonso de Quintanilla (of Castille, Spain), as he said that he would enslave the Indigenous population or coerce them to do whatever the Spanish Queen, Isabella de Castille, desired of them.[17] Columbus knew where the money that funded his voyages originated, and the wealth that he could reap on his voyages were secured by his allegiance to Spain. He wrote about the possibility of restructuring the land and stealing the people without so much as a thought for their well-being or say in the matter.
Michael Imperioli, an Italian American actor who plays Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, says that “[Christopher Columbus] enslaved and caused the death of many indigenous people”, which drew the ire of many conservatives.[18] However, Imperioli’s statements regarding Columbus are more than accurate. Donald Trump, during his time as President of the U.S., falsely claimed that “Columbus discovered America” despite evidence to the contrary that “Columbus never set foot in what was to become the United States”.[19] On October 3, 1988, Ronald Reagan made similar comments, stating that
“Columbus, of course, has always held a proud place in our history not only for his voyage of exploration but for the spirit that he exemplified. He was a dreamer, a man of vision and courage, a man filled with hope for the future and with the determination to cast off for the unknown and sail into uncharted seas for the joy of finding whatever was there. Put it all together and you might say that Columbus was the inventor of the American dream.”[20]
Reagan and Trump conflate Columbus’ pillaging of the Americas with an exploration of the United States. “[T]he American Dream” that Reagan spoke about is uniquely an ideal constructed by the United States and represents the hope of an immigrant community as opposed to the conquests of a colonizer. Reagan’s comparison of Columbus to later Italian immigrants is incongruous and inane. The majority of Italian Americans who immigrated to the United States were poor southern Italians who were described as “peasants”[21], and lacked the power, money, and resources that northerner Columbus was given for his voyage to the Americas. Most of these immigrants came alone to the United States, whereas Columbus brought an entire crew of (predominantly) Spanish conquistadors with him.[22] Also, Columbus landed in the Caribbean (as stated above, what we now call the United States was never reached by Columbus or his crew) and committed copious atrocities against the indigenous Taino population.
“Setting up shop on the large island he called Espa–ola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he promptly instituted policies of slavery (encomiendo) and systematic extermination against the native Taino population. Columbus’s programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as eight million at the outset of his regime to about three million in 1496. Perhaps 100,000 were left by the time of the governor’s departure. His policies, however, remained, with the result that by 1514 the Spanish census of the island showed barely 22,000 Indians remaining alive. In 1542, only two hundred were recorded. Thereafter, they were considered extinct, as were Indians throughout the Caribbean Basin, an aggregate population which totaled more than fifteen million at the point of first contact with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as Columbus was known.”[23]
In 1495, Columbus and his men instituted policies where Taino Indians were forced to pay tribute to the Spanish invaders. When the Tainos failed to supply the appropriate amount of gold, many were subjected to mutilation and had their hands severed.[24] Thousands died as a result; many Tainos (men, women, and even children) were also hanged, hacked apart with swords, and murdered in several other brutal and torturous methods.[25]
Ultimately, the legacy of Columbus has been distorted by many Americans, including former Presidents to use as a symbol of American exceptionalism. Despite that Columbus did not land in the United States, did not make his voyages in honor of Italy (as Italy was not a nation at the time, and he sailed for Spain), and was from a Northern Italian background (as opposed to most immigrants who originated in the South), many Americans disregard this information in favor of a revisionist history that portrays Columbus as a symbol of pride for the United States. Columbus and his crew committed countless acts of terror against Indigenous peoples for the sake of wealth and status. Italian Americans, who were mistreated and discriminated against when first arriving in the U.S., have shared more in common with African Americans than with that of the larger white Protestant society. However, some Italian Americans have shunned this history in favor of a revised tale to help elevate their social status; Christopher Columbus has been a central figure that has undergone such a revision. The celebration of Columbus is unpatriotic because it lauds a man who has been responsible for violence against the very first Americans. In a far more patriotic move, the celebration of Indigenous peoples or perhaps Indigenous American Day to supersede Columbus Day would be a good start and is already implemented by some states and several cities throughout the country.[26]
[1] Here Are The Cities That Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day Instead of Columbus Day. BY JENNIFER CALFAS
UPDATED: OCTOBER 9, 2017 3:05 PM ET | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 8, 2017 7:00 AM EDT. https://time.com/4968067/indigenous-peoples-day-columbus-day-cities/ . Retrieved October 11, 2021.
[2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263684372_’It’s_not_your_country_any_more’_Contested_national_narratives_and_the_Columbus_Day_parade_protests_in_Denver. ‘It’s not your country any more’. Contested national narratives and the Columbus Day parade protests in Denver. September 2013. European Journal of American Culture 32(3) DOI:10.1386/ejac.32.3.263_1 Authors: Sam Hitchmough University of Bristol
[3] https://www.gq.com/story/michael-imperioli-zen-profile. Inside the Zen Mind of Michael Imperioli
What do you do after starring on The Sopranos, arguably the greatest television show of all time? If you’re Michael Imperioli, a little bit of everything. Written by Gabriella Paiella. Photography by Ashley Olah. September 3, 2020. Retrieved October 11, 2021.
[4] The Sopranos, Season 4 Episode 3: Christopher. Created by David Chase. Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Michael Imperioli and Maria Laurino. 2002. HBO.
[5]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Are_Italians_White/82_EdI32PcYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Are+Italians+White%3F:+How+Race+is+Made+in+America&printsec=frontcover. Are Italians White: How Race is Made in America. Jennifer Guglielmo, Salvatore Salerno. p 9.
[6] Ibid. p 10.
[7] Ibid. p 10.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid. p 17.
[10] Ibid. p 11.
[11]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263684372_’It’s_not_your_country_any_more’_Contested_national_narratives_and_the_Columbus_Day_parade_protests_in_Denver. ‘It’s not your country any more’. Contested national narratives and the Columbus Day parade protests in Denver. September 2013. European Journal of American Culture 32(3) DOI:10.1386/ejac.32.3.263_1 Authors: Sam Hitchmough University of Bristol
[12]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Columbus_and_the_Quest_for_Jerusalem/3pkbGQs2vnoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=genocide. Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages that Led to America Carol Delaney. Introduction, p XII-XIII.
[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/science/african-american-dna.html?partner=msft_msn. Tales of African-American History Found in DNA. By Carl Zimmer. May 27, 2016.
[14] https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006059. The Great Migration and African-American Genomic Diversity. Soheil Baharian,Maxime Barakatt,Christopher R. Gignoux,Suyash Shringarpure,Jacob Errington,William J. Blot,Carlos D. Bustamante,Eimear E. Kenny,Scott M. Williams,Melinda C. Aldrich,Simon Gravel. Published: May 27, 2016.
[15]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Native_Americans_Christianity_and_the_Re/sp5XgQ_4wnwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=andrew%20jackson. Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape. 2010. Joel W. Martin. P 10.
[16] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Journal_of_Christopher_Columbus_duri/-DMSAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=subjugate. The Journal of Christopher Columbus (during His First Voyage, 1492-93) and Documents Relating the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real. 1893. Christopher Columbus. 1492-93. P 40.
[17] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Isabella/2-_YCwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=christopher%20columbus%20castile. Isabella:
The Warrior Queen. P 234, 235, 240. Kirstin Downey. 2015.
[18] https://www.gq.com/story/michael-imperioli-zen-profile. Inside the Zen Mind of Michael Imperioli
What do you do after starring on The Sopranos, arguably the greatest television show of all time? If you’re Michael Imperioli, a little bit of everything. Written by Gabriella Paiella. Photography by Ashley Olah. September 3, 2020. Retrieved October 11, 2021.
[19] https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/07/10/why-christopher-columbus-is-so-offensive-to-native-americans/ Why Christopher Columbus Is So Offensive to Native Americans
Native American activists have long seen Columbus as a villain, an agent responsible for the invasion, conquest and subsequent occupation of the Americas. The Conversation. Published 10 July 2020. Retrieved October 11, 2021.
[20] https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-signing-columbus-day-proclamation-0. Remarks on Signing the Columbus Day Proclamation. Ronald Reagan. October 3, 1988. Retrieved October 11, 2021.
[21]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Are_Italians_White/82_EdI32PcYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Are+Italians+White%3F:+How+Race+is+Made+in+America&printsec=frontcover. Are Italians White: How Race is Made in America. Jennifer Guglielmo, Salvatore Salerno. p 10.
[22]Ibid.
[23] https://www.mit.edu/~thistle/v9/9.11/1columbus.html History Not Taught is History Forgot:
Columbus’ Legacy of Genocide. Excerpted from the book Indians are Us (Common Courage Press, 1994)
by Ward Churchill. Columbus and the Beginning of Genocide in the “New World”.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Here Are The Cities That Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day Instead of Columbus Day. BY JENNIFER CALFAS
UPDATED: OCTOBER 9, 2017 3:05 PM ET | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 8, 2017 7:00 AM EDT. https://time.com/4968067/indigenous-peoples-day-columbus-day-cities/