Upon the removal of the Columbus statue from Grant Park following the protests in Chicago, I find it important as a person of Italian ancestry & citizenship to broadcast the following.

This debate over Columbuses of bronze seems more advanced in Boston than in other US cities, perhaps because of that city's storied labor history—one in which Italian Americans figured prominently—and the shame of having sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death unjustly.

In Boston, the memory of Sacco and Vanzetti is far more palpable than any 1492 voyage, whose carnage even I as a genXer was not taught in school.

In Boston, the possibility for reparative replacement of a monument representing a personage such as Columbus with representatives of peoples who were harmed by him and/or who actually represent the experience of Italian Americans is more alive than ever.

For those willing to remember, the discrimination, racialization, & forcible acculturation that Italian emigrants met with in the Americas should lead Italians within & outside of Italy to solidarity with recent waves of immigrants and other marginalized people—

...instead of to willful forgetting of their pre-assimilated condition and a quick uptake of 21st-century white supremacy.

My medieval to modern history course in Perugia began with my professor's declaration that modern history began in tragedy, with the voyage of Columbus. This is not such a controversy within Italy itself.

Columbus's figuration as an ancestor is rendered absurd by the fact that he predated the consolidation of a territory we now know as "Italy" & had next to nothing in common with people who sought refuge and opportunity in this hemisphere between the mid-19th and 20th century.

From his journal, on the Arawak people: "They do not bear arms, & do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance...They would make fine servants...with 50 men we could subjugate them all & make them do whatever we want."

After putting 1500 men, women, and children in pens and shipping them to Spain—a journey in which at least 200 people perished and the survivors were sold as slaves—he wrote, "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

If you have read this far and need further convincing (& aren't already within my choir), please see Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, & my colleague Edgar Garcia's Skins of Columbus.

It really is more than possible to be Italian, to love Italy fiercely, & simultaneously to be ashamed & infuriated by the legacy of Columbus and the way that legacy has become bound up in assimilationist, amnesiac and ultimately racist cultural "pride." https://commonwealthmagazine.org/arts-and-culture/italian-american-pride-means-goodbye-columbus/?fbclid=IwAR0zrM2-usN6GRdNDzkhPCj_YtrYW0Ss2w4GQshk9GEvQEYl80istcxEjC0

Unfortunately, those Italian brethren who are not part of my choir, who have drunk the bleach-derived, hundreds-of-thousands-of-people and landscape-killing Kool-Aid of Donald Drumpf, who need to read this statement in other words, will probably NOT read it,...

...either out of algorithm, knee-jerk blindedness, or impatience; & their own curiosity for the old country probably stops at its own ancient imperial monuments (& cuisine). Certainly it does NOT extend to study of the language our ancestors were forced to forget on our behalf.