The United States has been in a long-held debate about various monuments and statues for years. It’s been on my mind recently, after seeing a local news report about a paint-splattered Columbus statue. Let’s unpack this.
Earlier this week, I was watching the local news - something I used to do almost daily but no longer find myself doing. I turned it on in search of an explanation about the weather, but I was met with a story about another defaced statue.
I found myself baffled by the report, to be completely honest. It wasn’t the story itself that was bizarre to me, though; it was the tone and diction of the reporter. While the station showed footage of people scrubbing the statue back to normal, a voiceover basically explained to the audience that vandalism is bad. As one of their viewers, I felt like a toddler being scolded for drawing on the walls with crayons.
Instantly, I became frustrated. The story seemed like a missed opportunity. Instead of explaining why the statue is controversial enough to have been defaced - just as many others across the country have - or connecting this incident to a larger conversation, the report was oversimplified. In the most basic sense, it was this: vandalism is bad, these men are responsible, city officials spent all day scrubbing paint off the statue, now help police find the people responsible for such violent destruction.
For context, the defaced statue was a monument of Christopher Columbus in Worcester, Massachusetts. Two men doused it in red paint and, in black spray paint, wrote “genocide” across the fount of it. It was all caught on surveillance cameras in the early hours of the morning, so the purpose of the report - it seemed to me - was to seek the public’s help in finding information about the men in the video.
Upon hearing how, exactly, they defaced the statue, my genuine reaction was: “Well, they’re not wrong!” I would like to offer insight into my thought process, especially for those of you who may be confused by my reaction.
There is a level of irony when the man that the statue honors was held less accountable than the people defacing it. This is especially true when the way in which the statue was defaced is symbolic and completely accurate, historically speaking. It is instantly clear to me, as someone who understands the truth of who Columbus was, that the red paint represents the blood on his hands, and the word “genocide” suits him. The destruction was done in a way that is supposed to spark conversations that people have tried to start for years with no results. Certainly, vandalism is wrong, but that should not be the point of this conversation.
Now, if you are confused about how this destruction is representative of who Columbus was - you should research Christopher Columbus. I do not fault you for trusting what the education system taught you because why should you doubt it? Fundamentally speaking, people should be able to trust what their schools taught them. However, if you really spend some time researching the topics you were taught in school, the truth may shock you. (An interesting read, if you are interested, is Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. I read excerpts of it in high school, and I just ordered it to read the whole thing.)
Christopher Columbus did not really discover America. Native Americans were living here already, meaning Columbus stole the land from them and colonized the people who lived here, trafficking many as slaves and converting them to Christianity. Historians point out that accounts show he actually "never set foot on the mainland of North America, instead oversaw the colonization of Hispaniola, a Caribbean island that would become the Dominican Republic and Haiti."
It is worth noting that, in addition to being a colonizer, Columbus was also a murderer and a rapist, responsible for mass genocide against Native Americans. Research indicates that Columbus is responsible for killing an estimated 56 million people, which is about 90% of the native populations in the regions he colonized. In part, this was due to Europeans carrying foreign diseases with them to the “new world” that wiped out many tribes.
So, yes, the men who defaced the statue of Columbus had their facts straight.
That being said, Christopher Columbus is just one man (albeit many statues) who is at the center of this debate over monuments. The United States has a habit of ignoring its own wrongdoings by redirecting attention to the sins of other countries. It’s why the country has a Holocaust museum in D.C., but no museums dedicated to Japanese internment camps or slavery.
The debate surrounding monuments of confederate soldiers, like that of Columbus statues, seems obvious to me - take them down.
For more context, here are my stances on various arguments that have circulating, surrounding the debate about confederate monuments:
For your convenience, below is the timeline for the construction of confederate monuments.
The goal of this post is not to put words in your mouth and argue with you for my own pride. That would be, quite frankly, a waste of my time. Instead, the goal of this post is to provide a new perspective on the current conversation. A lot of the points being made in favor of maintaining the controversial statues do not consider the grand scheme of things. The ultimate goal of the current movement is for equality - just as it was in the 1960s, and as it has always been.
There are many issues with the current monuments that represent U.S. history, with the biggest problem being that there is a lack of diversity in this representation. We need to understand that the history we’ve all been taught is a white nationalist perspective of our history.
Instead of honoring people like Christopher Columbus and Robert E. Lee with monuments, we should consider figures like Cathay Williams, Anna Mae Aquash, and Marsha P. Johnson. This would be a first step towards recognizing our nation’s wrongdoings instead of ignoring the real history.
As this conversation continues to bubble under the larger battle for equality, consider the real history of our country and the people who are celebrated with these monuments. We must continue to do our research and listen to marginalized voices, in order to improve our country for a brighter future.
Have difficult conversations.
Learn about these issues on your own.
We are in this for the long haul, and education is vital to growth.
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