October 2008

Keeping Columbus Day

BY GAIL GEISENHAINER, SENIOR MINISTER, FIRST UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CONGREGATION OF ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN, AND MEMBER OF THE CLF BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Think back with me for a moment. How did you learn the story of Christopher Columbus? Those of us who live in North America and learned this story before say, the 1970s, most likely learned that an Italian-born man, Christopher Columbus, convinced the reigning monarchs of Spain, the ocean-going superpower of the 15th Century, to fund an ocean expedition. Columbus expected to open a massively lucrative trade route to India, Japan, and China by sailing west from Spain. He intended to circumnavigate the globe and land in the gold-and spice-laden lands known as India and The East.

Perhaps we also learned that Columbus was alone in his insistence that the round world could be navigated either east or west to reach the Indies. We were told that others of the time insisted on the erroneous view that the world was flat. Columbus alone held a vision closer to the truth.

This is the beginning of one story about Columbus. But there are other ways to tell the story.

Most variations agree on Columbus’s Italian origins. Most concur that the Spanish monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, were reluctant to fund Columbus’s venture.

Columbus first went to ask for funding from the monarchs in May, 1486. He made presentations to the monarchs for six years before they would fund his ventures. By that time, Portugal had successfully sailed down and around the southern tip of Africa. The eastern ocean route was opening rapidly. Columbus was eager to test his theories about the round world and about the western route to wealth in the Far East.

If you learned about Columbus from your high school text books, did the authors explain that Columbus was beside himself with anticipation to reach India to bring back gold, spices and wealth from Asia? Did they explain that Columbus expected the inhabitants of India and Japan to hand gold to him simply because he was a Christian and represented the Spanish king and queen?

In 1453, the Turkish Empire had closed off the overland trade routes from Spain to the Far East. Ottomans controlled all such trade and they made huge profits inflating prices for goods sold to the Spanish. By 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella had consolidated their power through a war on the Muslim Moorish Empire of Granada. They succeeded in capturing the city in 1492, thus freeing up considerable capital with which to fund Columbus’s voyages. Also in 1492, a royal decree was signed that expelled all Jews from Spain. Fresh from the war, and without Jewish capital, Spain needed gold.

The stories told about Columbus in old American history books were largely biased and false. We were taught to say that Columbus discovered America. We heard that Christopher Columbus was the first European to set foot on the North American continent. And we learned that Columbus, alone, knew the world was round. All three statements are false. Columbus invaded the native peoples of various Caribbean Islands. He did not discover them. They were already there. And he never set foot in North America. Long before Christopher Columbus, Vikings, and other Europeans sailed to the land newly named “the Americas.” And the Greeks, 2000 years before Columbus, taught that the earth was a sphere.

On October 12, 1492, Columbus’s expedition landed on the Caribbean Island we call San Salvador. Columbus was certain that he had landed on the continent of India. Hence the term “Indian,” for the native people he encountered that day.

At first contact, the native peoples, members of Arawak, Taino and Carib nations greeted the expedition warmly. They offered food, water, and presents in exchange for the glass beads and hawk’s bells offered by the Spaniards. From the very beginning, Columbus demanded gold from the native people he encountered. Failure to bring the required amounts would bring death or dismemberment. Over a short time, Columbus’s crews had raped, maimed, tortured and killed entire tribes, even nations, of people on the islands of the Caribbean. These brutal genocides were largely ignored in American history textbooks of earlier generations. Recent books acknowledge the devastation.

Some people would have us respond to the barbarism and grand scale evil of Columbus’s avarice and wholesale disregard for the people he encountered and harmed by having us stop completely any recognition of the day of first encounter. We are told that celebrating Columbus Day is to honor and promote the racism, the brutality, the heinous mistreatment of human beings wrought by Columbus and his crew.

I respectfully disagree.

Here’s what I propose. I say let’s keep Columbus Day. This is not a day for parades and carnivals. Instead let’s hold it high, take it as a sacred day of study and reflection on the practice and forms of racism.

According to the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Weaving the Fabric of Diversity curriculum:

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission defines racism as any attitude or institutional structure that subordinates a person or group because of color. Racial prejudice is not merely personal prejudice. It is prejudice and bigotry combined with economic, political, and social power, institutionalized throughout our society. Racial prejudice plus power provides racism. It is a social phenomenon designed to isolate and/or exploit others based on the belief that one group’s racial or ethnic identity, physical and cultural characteristics, lifestyle and aspirations are normative, valuable, and superior to those of another group.

Better yet, rather than just focusing on racism, let’s work in the positive. Yes, we need to understand racism: how it works, how we practice it, how we unwittingly defend and foster it. But let’s also advocate for such positive steps as annual Columbus Day diversity training, and multi-cultural success stories from our local communities. Let’s create centers of learning to discover ways for people to encounter one another and encourage one another with respect in the presence of deep differences of culture, ethnicity, religious practice, abilities, and ways of being in the world.

History books may teach us that Columbus was a gifted navigator and an accomplished sailor. But the coordinates of his moral compass have not endured over time. By his example, he taught that military power and physical strength were enough to allow one culture to exploit and decimate others. Columbus judged the native peoples of the Caribbean inferior to the white, Catholic Spaniards.

In the 20th century, the walls that continued these rudimentary racist ideologies began to crumble. Activists began the work to dismantle structures of evil that allowed subjugation of human beings based on skin color. We made great and necessary progress. But the job is not over.

Racism has taken on more subtle forms. Our 21st century task is to unmask the new forms of oppression and continue to build our visions of the Beloved Community, where all are equal, welcome and respected.

Oppression begins when we presume that the people, the traditions, practices, cultures, food, clothing, language, laws, dances, slang, religion, music and art with which we are familiar are normative. The people who look like me, act, eat, behave like me, the ones with whom I am familiar, those people practice the right ways to act, dress, speak, eat or love. This is what Columbus brought in his very first encounters with the Arawak people.

Columbus judged the Arawak people from the moment he first saw them. They were naked. His culture relied on elaborate clothing systems that indicated gender, social standing, wealth and power. He then judged the Arawak people to be inferior to him because they were different. He made no effort to understand their culture.

But Unitarian Universalism, by its very nature, stands counter to this kind of oppression, since we hold to a religious vision that declares that there is no one normative belief system, that there are many equally valid paths to the truth. Let us grow in knowledge and depth in our Unitarian Universalist faith, which will guide us toward our visions of justice. Let’s keep Columbus Day as a day of learning and hope, a day to build our vision.