10/12/2026
Today is Columbus Day. And I continue to object to the political project of replacing it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Not because Indigenous peoples don’t deserve recognition, but because that recognition doesn’t have to come at the expense of a holiday that has long held cultural significance for Italian Americans. Activists and politicians deliberately placed the two in direct competition. And I think that decision reflects something much larger about how certain academics, activists, and politicians interpret Western history. They have increasingly turned historical recognition into an exercise in moral retribution, seeking not simply to acknowledge historical injustices but to revise the cultural narratives through which emerging generations understand Western civilization itself. Naturally, they present this as cultural sensitivity, moral progress, and a more enlightened understanding of history.
What I find particularly ironic is that a movement concerned with the historical erasure of Indigenous peoples can show remarkable indifference toward the cultural identity of Italian Americans. Columbus Day is not simply a referendum on the personal character of Christopher Columbus. Generations of Italian Americans have embraced it as part of their cultural identity and tradition. Yet the prevailing rhetoric increasingly treats honoring that tradition as an endorsement of colonial brutality. In other words, political activists impose their own interpretation of the holiday over the meaning that generations of Italian Americans have attached to it. And they risk characterizing anyone who refuses that interpretation as morally deficient.
There is another dimension to this that I find particularly revealing. Some academics and political activists romanticize Indigenous societies to an extraordinary degree, portraying them as uniquely peaceful, spiritually enlightened, or morally uncorrupted by the ambitions they associate with Western civilization. In doing so, they strip Indigenous peoples of the very human complexity they claim to recognize. They reduce them to symbols of innocence rather than acknowledge them as human beings capable of the same virtues, ambitions, rivalries, and cruelties as anybody else. Meanwhile, they reduce the West to a singular moral category, an epithet for conquest, exploitation, and evil.
Christopher Columbus was not a great person. I have no interest in rehabilitating his character or denying the atrocities that accompanied European colonization. But Europeans did not invent conquest, territorial expansion, slavery, subjugation, or the displacement of populations. Indigenous societies fought wars, competed for territory, conquered neighboring peoples, and sometimes committed massacres. Arab Muslim empires expanded through military conquest beginning in the seventh century and practiced slavery throughout much of their history. African kingdoms and empires also waged wars, expanded their territories, and enslaved other populations. None of these historical examples excuses the West. They remind us that human beings, across geography and culture, have repeatedly demonstrated the capacity for domination and cruelty.
And that’s precisely my point. If we want to understand history, we must recognize these tendencies wherever they emerge rather than selectively attribute them to civilizations we have already decided to condemn. Recognizing Indigenous suffering is not the problem. That recognition is legitimate and important. The problem arises when people turn history into an ideological morality play in which one civilization embodies the worst of humanity while others occupy the role of innocent victims. That doesn’t produce a more sophisticated understanding of history. It produces a different kind of historical distortion.
