Welcome to Whiteness Wednesdays.
So, this past Monday was a federal holiday: officially Columbus Day, but celebrated by many of us as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. If you’re reading this here, you likely don’t need me to tear apart Columbus’ record...but just in case you’re wanting a brief rundown on why you should think he’s a scumbag, here’s a brief primer (it includes fun drawings as well, because I’m not a monster; I wouldn’t make you read even more after slogging through my essays): theoatmeal.com/…
But what’s so special about Christopher Columbus? Why does he matter? I mean, aside from being chosen by a mobster as part of a campaign to rehabilitate the perception of Italian-Americans as, well, mobsters?
Sure, he didn’t “discover” anything since people were already living and thriving here until he showed up and started doing his level best to change both those verbs, but he also wasn’t the first European explorer to reach this land: we know the Norse did almost 500 years earlier, and there’s archaeological evidence in finds in both the New and Old World that supports arguments that explorers from Africa, Rome, or even Japan made it to the New World by the time Columbus, Scandinavians, or earlier still. Some of whom might have even returned to their homelands later with word of these strange new lands they encountered.
Our country, as you may have noticed, isn’t named for him: “Columbia” is an antiquated and archaic nickname for our country, but these lands have always been named “America” after Amerigo Vespucci, not Columbus. Partly because Columbus didn’t even think he’d arrived anywhere "new”: he died convinced he had found the back-door side of Asia.
So, again, why Columbus? He didn’t found the first permanent settlements here, he wasn’t English, he wasn’t Spanish, he wasn’t even the most important Italian in our history...so, why does he matter?
It’s in part because mythologizing him is a key part of White identity: without Columbus’ semi-deification, the rest can easily fall apart. His story is where Whiteness was born.
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So, what do I mean “his story is where Whiteness is born”? Simply, the legacy of “Whiteness” as a concept starts with him and the arrival of imperialists in the Americas.
Whiteness is artificial; there is no “White Homeland”, after all. “White” was invented to justify a caste system: it was a Devil’s bargain to justify chattel slavery and native genocide by drawing an arbitrary line between “White” people and the “swarthier races”. At first, in the colonies’ earliest days “White” meant English, then later French and Scottish, but even Ben Franklin considered Germanic people (like me) to be savage, swarthy folk who would never be proper White people.
To say I am not White isn’t just silly, it’s patently false — you don’t get much whiter than me even if you’re albino or have severe vitiligo. I know that for a fact; I’ve compared my skin to both, and frequently had total strangers comment on my stark paleness. One of my coworkers once famously asked me “Mr. Toro, are you okay? You look so white, I mean, even whiter than usual”.
I am quite literally the furthest thing from a Person of Color, which should go to show just how seriously I mean it when I say “White” is an arbitrary label: if you’re calling people like me too swarthy to be White, you’re clearly going off something other than skin color.
It’s a delusion, but a crucial one, and it starts with Columbus because THAT is where the lie begins.
The true Devil's Bargain was first proposed when an Italian, under orders from the Spanish crown and with the blessing of the Catholic Church (and by extension Europa writ large), slaughtered and raped the land and peoples different from them for fun and profit (and I do mean “fun”, unless they simply hated marrying child slave brides but did it out of spite).
America was “cleared” for settlement via genocide and germ warfare. The New World is a post-apocalyptic landscape — there were dozens of vast nations when Columbus arrived, each the rival of a European power in population and scale, with trade networks that stretched from Canada to Chile.
Disease was the vanguard, and gunpowder weapons and steel in the hands of sociopathic invaders did the rest.
These are not hypotheticals or revisionist history, they simply are: we live on a graveyard, in cities built by ethnic-cleansing conquerors.
Those conquerors then imported slaves by the millions to build cities, work fields, and toil endlessly for them. This nation was built and nurtured with blood and tears, that is the legacy. It is not a hypothetical or revisionist history, it simply is.
The bare facts cry out for justice, for a balancing of the scales. White people are not devils (despite what some might think and how some act to this day); having pale skin doesn’t stop you from gaping in horror when you hear these facts, in wanting to set right the wrongs as best you can. But to fix things, to make them right, would require a full accounting of what has been done: you need Truth before and as part of Reconciliation.
The story starts with Columbus, but it doesn’t end there. It doesn’t end at all, because there is an unbroken line over five centuries long from there to now. The false narrative starts with him to protect what has been stolen and hoarded, and every year the debt gets larger and larger, the lie more crucial to keep the dam from breaking.
This is why people fight so hard to defend his image, why the right idolizes without question a man who was a mass-murdering monster and revived as a mainstream hero by another monster: because his narrative is part of White mythology, a keystone. Once you learn the truth and reject the narrative of his life, the rest begins to unravel like a particularly flimsy sweater.
This is why even now they’re working hard to brainwash children while they’re young and trusting and impressionable to identify with Columbus, with the victors to whom the spoils have gone: he needs to be a hero not because we live in Columbia, or Italy, or Spain, but because he is White, and we are White. He needs to be a heroic man who was no worse or bad than anyone else in “those days”, because then we can excuse our own excesses and misdeeds towards non-Whites today.
They were better off back then under our benevolent rule...so why not now, too?
Columbus is the fork in the road — you can’t pretend he’s a hero without buying into lie after lie, and you can’t reject him as a fraud without questioning lie after lie. Black people and Native Americans don’t have to wrestle with this cognitive dissonance: they know the truth about their history, even if we don’t (whether by ignorance or deception). But us White folks? They teach us the lies before we are old enough to know the truth, both at school and at home where family, professionals, and community all participate either by deliberately partaking in the deception or (most often for a long time now) simply repeating the lies they were taught long ago and never un-learned.
For a few brief decades we had a real effort to push back on this before the right realized, almost too late, that the truth would destroy the whole thing. You see it with their endless assault on education, on public broadcasting, on “Woke” or whatever the buzzword of the month is for “things I don’t want to hear because they make me uncomfortable to think about”. The lie, above all else, must be protected. It must endure. The lie is sacred, the lie is holy, the lie is our National Mythology.
The lie’s name is Whiteness, and Chapter 1, Verse 1 says “In the beginning, Columbus discovered America, and it was Good.”
We all know what happens to heathens and heretics who question the Holy Word, don’t we?
