We don’t need to give a statue to a genocidal sex trafficker. Thursday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo confirmed his support for the Christopher Columbus statue in Manhattan. His reasoning: The statue represents “the Italian American legacy in this country, and the Italian American contribution in this country,” he said during a press briefing.
As an Italian American and third-generation New Yorker, let me just call bullshit. We have pizza and Marisa Tomei to remind us of our contributions to the United States — we don’t need a genocidal sex trafficker to sully all that.
Columbus not only facilitated the murder and torture of Native people — on multiple occasions he ordered people’s ears and noses cut off as punishment — he was a sex trafficker and slave trader. Columbus sold girls as young as nine years old into sexual slavery and was known for kidnapping women to give to his crew members to rape. No wonder people have targeted his statues the last few days: Protesters in Boston decapitated an effigy in the city’s North End, and a Columbus monument in Richmond, Virginia, was torn down and thrown into a lake.
It’s some much-delayed and well-deserved comeuppance for a man whose brutality is almost never fully recognized by political leaders. In defending the statue, Cuomo tried to gloss over Columbus’ sins, saying, “I understand the feelings about Christopher Columbus and some of his acts, which nobody would support, but the statue has come to represent and signify an appreciation for the Italian American contribution to New York.” Mealy-mouthed words to describe racist and misogynist atrocities.
When Mayor Bill de Blasio considered removing the Columbus statue from New York in 2017, the president of the Columbus Citizens Foundation published a similarly cowardly defense in a full-page ad in the New York Times, writing that while Columbus, the man who is responsible for the decimation of the Arawak and Carib peoples, “certainly partook in actions over the course of his career that were deemed unjust… we cannot and will not deny the role [Columbus] had in the eventual shaping of the United States of America.”
It’s true that Italian Americans made incredible contributions to the development of the U.S., New York in particular. If we want to represent the Italian American community and all its done for America, why not put up a statue commemorating the 4,000 Italian garment workers in New York — women who rioted in 1913 for better wages and working conditions? Or Vito Marcantonio, the East Harlem politician who was elected into the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1930s? Marcantonio sponsored bills to make lynching a federal crime and to eliminate the poll tax.
We’ve got Robert De Niro and the Feast of the Seven Fishes; Madonna and mozzarella. I don’t care if you want to throw up a statue of a nonna making Sunday sauce (in fact, that sounds sort of amazing) — anyone but Christopher Columbus.
The truth is I can’t imagine that anyone but the very old guard of Italian Americans actually cares much about Columbus. I’ve never heard any of my grandparents or aunts and uncles mention him as some sort of cultural touchstone. While there are old Italian social clubs who might make a fuss about the statue removal, my sense is that the resistance to change is more about wanting to have a day or a monument to appreciate who we are and what’s important to us than Columbus himself.
Any would-be naysayers, and Cuomo himself, would be wise to keep in mind that for a short while, Italian Americans were the victims of violent discrimination in the U.S. — the most notorious being the murder of 11 Italian men in New Orleans in 1891. Why would we want our legacy to be attached to a man who represents the worst of humanity? Cuomo of all people should understand all this — after all, he comes from a proud Italian American family.