The Trump administration declared Oct. 13 as “Columbus Day.”
The proclamation describes Columbus’s travels, writing “Columbus made landfall in the modern-day Bahamas. Upon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith … He later ventured onward to Cuba and other islands in the Caribbean — exploring their coasts and engaging with their people.”
What is conveniently left out of this story by the administration is what “engaging with their people” actually looked like. It was the enslavement of Indigenous peoples to collect cotton and gold, the eating of indigenous people and the genocide of indigenous populations, among many other atrocious acts.
The supposed exploration done by Columbus and subsequent Europeans would become the colonization of the Western Hemisphere and begin the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, resulting in the incalculable devastation to indigenous North Americans, Carribeans, Latin Americans, West Africans and their cultures.
Trump’s history of Columbus differs from the actual history of Columbus. Trump is using a mythology built around Columbus to revive a sense of nationalism in America.
He is paralleling the playbook of past fascist regimes, like the Axis Powers. Germany and Italy both used the falsehood of historical genetic links to the “Aryan race,” a superior race of people, even though race is not a biological reality but a social construct.
This claim to Aryan-hood is what allowed the masses of people to turn a blind eye to the violence perpetuated against their neighbors with different ethnic and racial backgrounds. The Germans borrowed a lot from other cultures — like that of the Roman Empire, seen in the Roman salute, and Hinduism, via the appropriation of the Swastika — for their historical myth.
Thus, the only historical glory that can be pointed to in (white) American history is with figures like Columbus, the founding fathers and early presidents — hence the consistent Trump administration push to uphold imagery and fantasy about these warmongering, genocidal, slave-owning colonist. He is trying to win over white people in this nation by making them feel like descendants of these historical figures, simply based on their race.
America needs race as a tool to justify the existence and nationalistic pride of millions of white-European settlers in the homeland of the non-white indigenous people. Trump is weaponizing Columbus in his attempt to create a mythology around American history and about the origins and early leaders of America. America seemingly does not have the history of civilization and culture and people that Italy, Germany and Imperial Japan had to mythologize.
Except it does. Those civilizations, however, are not white.
The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have tens of thousands of years of history, society, culture, traditions, empires and mythology. White Americans, however, occupy a fraction of that timeline and rely on their warped Eurocentric narrative.
America is an extremely ethnically and racially diverse nation, which is a product of the colonialism imposed by b—-rd like Columbus.
The Trump administration seeks to undermine the Indigenous peoples as a whole by ignoring their existence pre-Columbus and by ignoring the ethnic cleansing, massacres, slavery and genocide used to dwindle their populations post-Columbus. American fascists attempt to use Columbus as proof of white heritage in the Americas.
Being taught that Columbus supposedly “discovered” the Americas leaves the lingering notion that the Americas and Caribbean were just vast continents of land full of animals and resources, but no people.
Columbus mythology fits in line with the white nationalist lie of the Great Replacement Theory, which proposes that nations of predominantly white populations are being “invaded” by immigrants (mainly asylum seekers) and non-white minorities who have an insidious goal of destroying the “white race” by replacing all white people with non-white people.
Ironically, or maybe intentionally, the same thing that is accused of immigrants and minorities is exactly what Columbus and white colonists from Europe did to the Indigenous Americans.
The celebration of Columbus supports the lie of white nativism in America and spits on the grave of the tens of millions of indigenous people, cultures and land. Which were all subject to genocide, torture, destruction and exploitation.
Nefarious actors today employ the white nativist myth of Columbus to finish the job of the entire erasure of Indigenous Americans. It supports white nationalist theories on the United States origins and aims to indoctrinate them into this mythological history, making the white population servile and passive to the growing authoritarian regime. If you’re still unconvinced, ask yourself: If the Trump administration considers Columbus’s exploration and supposedly friendly interactions with the indigenous people of the Caribbean as patriotic, why is the administration so eager to violently deport the overwhelming non-white Caribbean, Mexican, Central and South American descendants of the same indigenous people today?
