An Editorial, and if Bari Weiss was as “fearless” as she thinks she is, she’d publish this. Come on, Bari; just like Sara Bareilles, I wanna see you be BRAVE.
I am a second-generation Italian-American. My great-grandfather, Raphael (not the painter, sadly), and great-grandmother, Caterina, brought their two sons, Vincenzo and Angelo, to the US from Italy in the 1940s, to escape the dual reign of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. According to family legend, Angelo (my grandfather) was shot in the leg by a Stormtrooper, and likely would have been killed if his dog hadn’t jumped between him and the gun. I have no proof that this is true, and Angelo died in 2004, so I’m going to say, “I mean, it’s plausible,” and leave it there.
I grew up in a steel town in Northeast Ohio, surrounded by other second- and third-generation Italian-Americans. We were all made aware of the first great Italian to grace American soil, Christopher Columbus: How he survived a dangerous journey across the sea, how he landed in the Caribbean thinking he’d found India, and how in spite of his great discovery of another continent between India and Spain, he died penniless.
It was that last detail that stuck with me. If Columbus was such a great man, why hadn’t he died comfortably wealthy? That was the fate of other explorers, after all. What set Columbus apart?
Well… I learned. I learned about the genocide he committed against the Arawak and Taíno peoples. I learned about him bragging about raping nine-year-old girls and selling them into slavery. I learned that his methods were so brutal, even his benefactor, Queen Isabella of Spain, was disgusted and cut off his funding. And I learned how all of these actions have resonated throughout the ages, especially among indigenous Americans.
To be fair, it’s not like I was taught that Columbus was an entirely unassailable hero. I was told, in elementary school in the mid-1990s, that Columbus called the indigenous peoples he conquered “Indians” because he thought he’d found India. This was presented to us as a little “whoopsie,” committed by someone who was laboring under the shared delusion that the Earth was flat and the Atlantic Ocean was entirely empty. You know, understandable; after all, what silly things do we believe now, that will be refuted by science hundreds of years after we die? We shouldn’t judge too harshly, and of course, we never speak ill of the dead.
However, being a girl with ADHD and “oppositional defiance disorder” (that is, not meek, not submissive, and always asking “why,” like the disrespectful little Jezebel-in-the-making all girls really are) who grew up into a woman with ADHD and zero fucks to give, I’m going to break both of those rules:
(1) Christopher Columbus was a pedophile, a rapist, and a genocidal religious fanatic, and on those grounds alone, he deserves to be forgotten.
(2) If that dumbfuck actually thought the world was flat and there was nothing between Spain and India to the west, he doesn’t deserve to be remembered.
Not only that, but it’s almost trite to mention that Columbus was not, by any means or metric, the “first person to discover the Americas.” If you paid attention in history class, you heard about the Viking explorers Leif Eriksson and Erik the Red (and I thought the 1990s had way too many Erics), and how they “discovered” Newfoundland over a thousand years before Columbus, Vespucci, or any other European explorer. If you ask me, the first people to “discover” the Americas were indigenous Americans, whose DNA was recently found to stretch back at least 10,000 years all across North and South America; in one case, to remains found in Nevada’s Spirit Cave, which are believed to be around 10,700 years old.
There is, however, no point in pretending that other, non-native Americans did “discover” the Americas for their own cultures. If we take that as read, then the question becomes, “who are the first non-indigenous Americans who discovered them?”
In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen points out that the famous Olmec head statues of Mesoamerica have what could be considered African features. So, is it possible that African explorers had “discovered” the Americas, possibly thousands or tens of thousands of years before any Europeans? And that they might have established colonies in the Americas, living and intermarrying with indigenous South Americans? Loewen himself states that he doesn’t know if he believes this, but that this idea should be presented in high school world history classes, to get students debating and thinking outside the box, and outside the “white people are better at everything” narrative American history pushes.
With all of that said and considered, I am also aware that Italian-Americans have our own, complicated history with the concepts of both “being American” and “being white.” Today, no one except the most hardcore, Nick Fuentes-worshipping MAGAs would consider me anything but white and American; after all, Italy is in Europe! It’s the birthplace of this “fascism” shit they love so much! And I was born in Ohio, to parents who were born in Ohio and Maryland, of course I’m a white American! (And the fact that Groypers worship a guy whose name literally means “fountains” in Spanish, a language in the US most associated with Mexicans, who are not considered white, is something that will never stop making my brain hurt.¹)
But about 125 years ago, Italians were not considered “proper Americans,” i.e., white. To quote a comment written by u/mimicofmodes, from the AskHistorians subreddit: “Americans with English heritage, often descended from pre-Revolutionary colonists or from immigrants from early in the 19th century, saw themselves at worst as the default, and at their most self-aggrandizing, a superior form of humanity. Protestant > Catholic, and certain flavors of Protestantism were better than others. Northern Europe > Southern Europe; Western Europe > Central or Eastern Europe; England > Scotland > Ireland. Stereotypes of these white immigrants abounded, usually depicted with painful eye-dialect in writing or in thick accents on the stage; they wouldn’t always be written as negative characters, per se, but the humor came at the expense of how Other they were from “normal” Americans. And things got uglier with the Know-Nothing movement, a nativist group/party that organized against immigrants because “they’re lazy”, “they’re taking jobs”, “they’re outnumbering good Anglo-Saxon stock”, and the other xenophobic fears that certainly were not confined to that one moment in time.”
One of the ways that Italian-Americans “became” Americans, and considered white, was to push the myth of Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer who “discovered” the Americas. They elevated him from a violent religious zealot to something almost god-like: A visionary, thought to be insane, but believed in by the “tiny” country of Spain (at the time, the most powerful country in the world), chosen by God to bring the knowledge of the New World to Europe! A land of religious freedom and unlimited opportunity! Rich in resources for anyone to partake in, and land more fertile by far than any other.
In a time where fact-checking was much harder, and there was no internet or social media to give voice to the marginalized and silenced indigenous community, it’s easy to see how people fell for this. And it worked: Part of the reason Italian-Americans were elevated to “white” status around the 1920s was the veneration of Columbus. (And also needing bodies to fight in WW1, and an upswing in Klan membership, where the last almost intelligent person to join up realized that “white” Irish and Italians would be useful in upholding white supremacy.)
There is an argument to be made, that I should be grateful that the myth of Christopher Columbus led to my assumed American-ness. I probably should, but I don’t. I don’t believe in gussying up and mythologizing a child rapist, whether or not he came from the same country that my great-grandparents did. I don’t care where Columbus came from. His origins don’t excuse his actions. If I can’t slap random people and get off scot-free by telling the judge, “my parents hit me when I was a child,” then I don’t think Columbus should be allowed to get away with child rape and genocide, just because he “diskuvverd” the country I happened to be born in.
Frankly, as an Italian-American living in 2026, watching as due process is gleefully suspended for anyone ICE (and, of course, the obviously racist “leadership” of this country) doesn’t consider “white” or “American”, and as ICE goons gun down people in the streets, purely at their discretion and with total immunity, I not only don’t want to have this conversation again, I don’t want to give ICE fuel. It won’t be too much longer before we all need papers to walk in the streets. It won’t be too much longer before we’re all subjected to the same kind of ridiculous “whiteness” tests the South African government used to administer.² It won’t be too much longer before bombs start dropping.
But, if I may? I we must have a day celebrating Italian-Americans… Can we celebrate Liza Minnelli? I mean, what did Liza ever do, except make great movies? And! Why not include Vincente Minnelli in that celebration? I can see it now: All-day marathons of Meet Me In St. Louis, An American in Paris, Gigi, Cabaret, Arthur, and Arrested Development. Topped off with re-airings of Liza With a Z.
Come on, people, while we still have some freedom in programming!
¹Yes, I am aware of all the following: (1) Spain is a European country. (2) The Spanish colonized Mexico long before the French and the British colonized Canada and New England, respectively. (3) Spain was a fascist dictatorship for longer than both Italy and Germany, in spite of getting a later start. (4) Francisco Franco was the most “successful” fascist dictator in history, seeing as he was never deposed and died in power from natural causes. (5) We really need to come up with another word besides “success” to describe fascists, because fascism is never the result of, nor resulting in, anything that any sane person considers “success.” And (6) None of that changes the fact that, in the US, a person with the surname “Fuentes” is statistically more likely to be Mexican than Spanish. Simply because there are more Mexican-Americans in the US in 2025 than Spanish-Americans.
²This is what happens when white South Africans raised in the thick of Apartheid become rich and decide to play puppet master to senile and stupid white Americans. Frankly, I think we should send them to Mars. All of them. No food, no water, no fuel, no right or way of return. Just the money. See how “civilized” all them dumbass white bois are when they’re starving!
Loading comments...