Column
Columbus Doesn’t Represent Italian Americans’ History, He Tarnishes It
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.
